Tropical Torment
by Shadow Dragoness
Summary: I thought it was God's way of finally smiling down upon me. A new career as a writer, a cruise, an island getaway... I just realized far too late that the island getaway was a tropical torment and that the smile was marred by blood-red scars. Joker/OC
1. A Brutal Beginning

**Hey Everyone!  
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**This is my first fanfiction, so please let me know what you think. I'm looking to improve my writing and to overall, write more as often as possible.**

**This is a work in progress, and I'm not totally certain of where it's going to go. The rating may change depending on what I come up with. Please, feel free to leave suggestions and criticism of all types. I'd love to hear what you all think about my first story here. Thanks to all of the authors I've encountered thus far for inspiring and motivating me to try some fanfiction of my own. And to everyone I've yet to encounter, I look forward to experiencing anything you may have to teach or learn as well. Thank you, and enjoy. :3**

**Disclaimer: I don't own The Dark Knight or The Joker. They belong to Christopher Nolan and DC Comics, if I'm correct. I could be said to own my OC and my nameless rabble of victims, though. **

**Note: I envisioned the Joker in this to be Heath Ledger's, but I suppose the character is debatable.**

**So, without further ado, I give you...  
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Tropical Torment Chapter 1

A Brutal Beginning

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The tang of salt was sharp upon my tongue. The sun poured its sunny rays down from its dwelling high in the sky surrounded by not a single ivory cloud. The oceanic air whirled around me, softly ruffling my long brown hair. The bow of the yacht cut smoothly through the sea, plowing through the beautiful blue expanse. I sat, wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts and a pale white top, in a luxurious cushioned deck chair positioned so that I could gaze admiringly over the shiny white railing of the _Ocean Angel 5_. I didn't care to ask what happened to the previous four _Ocean Angels_. I was too blissful to care about anything. There was just something about being kissed by the sun, rocked by the waves, and caressed by the breeze that made all of life's problems simply fade away. And the fact that I didn't have the monstrous bite out of my cash made it even sweeter. I had won this vacation, free of charge, from a novel-writing contest in Gotham.

Yes, I lived in that dark, crime-infested city. I was young, but old enough to remember what things were like before Batman slipped from the shadows. I felt much safer knowing he was around. I know some people thought of him as a criminal, but I only admired him more, knowing that he continued to save lives with such ignorant opposition. There wasn't a crime out there that he failed to know about, not a grimy thug he couldn't catch and make to face justice. Well, I guess I can't say that… for there is one. Oh, Batman's caught him numerous times, but he always manages to escape. Gotham's most wanted criminal, the one whose name makes cops cringe and children cry, the one whose face frightens the most powerful nation, the Clown Prince of Crime himself: the Joker.

I shivered a little in the warm, tropical breeze simply at the thought of him. He'd abducted everyone from the old DA's girlfriend to Lao, one of Japan's wealthiest businessmen, despite all of his defenses. He'd killed everyone from people who simply shared part of their name with his newest victim to the previous Commissioner Lobe, the previous Judge Serprilos, and some even suspected he'd killed Harvey Dent, the old Defense Attorney, who had cleaned up Gotham better than anyone had believed and shined rays of hope down upon all of its citizens. He's even almost had Coleman Reece from _Gotham Tonight_ killed by everyday citizens twisted and morphed by fear to do his bidding for him.

He'd blown up ferries, hospitals, and police buildings. He'd robbed banks for millions. He'd dragged Gotham kicking and screaming into darkness. No one was safe from him. Oh, Batman has tried to take him down, but Batman doesn't kill. He never kills. He endures and holds strong where others fail, even when the Joker threatened to expose him to the world. And so, seeing as the Joker is still alive, he's still burning, killing, and laughing.

I swallowed a large gulp of my Mango punch and tried to think of my present luxurious situation. I was on a yacht cruising across the Atlantic. What did I have to worry about? All of my work was done. I was living off of the cold hard cash of my rapidly-selling new book. I was going to live it up to the best of my ability. Now wasn't the time to think of the Joker or hospitals blowing up or any other negative prospect. This was a place of bliss, of happiness, of good food and drink and people, and of _relaxation_. I wouldn't let unwelcome and ridiculous thoughts ruin this for me. I had worked very hard to get here, and would enjoy it to the fullest.

I took another cool, refreshing drink, settled back in my chair, and closed my eyes. The sun eased the soothing process, gently warming my skin. It was only a minute or two before my calm and tranquil mindset had returned and enveloped me softly in its relaxing embrace. We were still hours away from our destination, and I was just fine with that. More time to soak up the sun and down fruity drinks. I smiled at my reasoning. I was not normally this free-spirited. I enjoyed order, reason, and organization more often than a lack of them.

I suppose that did not mean that I couldn't enjoy myself in other ways when such a wondrous and savoring opportunity was laid open and luxurious before me. Warm weather and the glories of oceanic nature always brushed my soul on a very unique level. The best part was that my fellow passengers were reasonably quiet or in other portions of the ship. I also enjoyed solitude, for periods of recollection and calming meditation. The fact that I wasn't surrounded by screaming and hollering children and loudly-conversing adults just made this ship even better. The sounds of gulls crying, water breaking, dolphins jumping, and sea breezes blowing were music to my nature-loving ears.

I sipped my fruity drink and watched the world around me, in a state of bliss until an unexpected whistle rang out. I glanced to my right toward the opposite railing and noticed other people stirring awake in their cushioned deck chairs around me. A voice spoke to all of us.

"Good afternoon, ladies and gentle_men_. We are now nearing our _final_ destination." A sound like laughter being smothered caused many people around me as well as me to adopt confused expressions. The voice. It stirred something horrible in my memory, as if I had heard it before in less-than-desirable circumstances. My hair tossed wildly in my face, bringing the fact that the velocity of the wind or the ship was most likely changing very rapidly into my consciousness. Alarm beginning to swarm in my brain, I leaned forward and gazed toward the bow of the boat.

An island loomed before us, approaching at a steady pace. The boat would have plenty of time to slow and dock safely in the shallows after throwing down the anchor. I began to relax, leaning back and sipping my drink. Suddenly I choked and lunged forward again. My hands gripped the railing like claws as I looked at the sea. A dark strip tinted the water a short distance ahead of the ship. With a gasp I realized it was a reef and would most likely remove the bottom half of the ship if we hit it at our current speed. I could have been wrong. I wasn't the most sea-vessel-wise person in the world, certainly not, but I could gauge space and distance well enough.

Even if we would miss the reef, I couldn't deny that something was wrong. The ship was moving too fast. And the voice. I couldn't place it. I set my drink down and stood up, my shoes clicking against the sun-warmed deck. People glanced up at me as I passed, heading toward the control station of the ship to ask the captain what the hell he was doing. Noticing how I wasn't the only one in a state of alarm, I took the stairs two at a time, my hair whipping even faster now, and ran into a stewardess at the top.

"May I help you?" she asked, her large smile just barely normal.

"Where's the captain?" I questioned, probably appearing to be an escapee from a mental institution.

"Steering the ship, of course," she replied. I frowned at her, my mind racing. I wasn't even sure if there really was something wrong, but a desperate force propelled me to find the answer.

"I need to speak with him," I told her, sneaking a glance and finding that the ship was dangerously close to the reef. There was still time – if she would move!

"I'm sorry, but–" Her sentence cut off as I ducked and darted passed her into the inner portion of the ship, running down the nearest hallway without a clue where I was going. Stupid, yes, but what I felt was my only option.

"Miss!" I heard the stewardess call, though the sound weakened as I got further and further away from her.

Following the numbered directory, I got my bearings and skidded to a stop in front of a thick white door. I extended my hand and knocked. Without a verbal reply, the door fell open as if it had already been broken into, revealing a haunting scene to my saucer-sized eyes. A man dressed in the purest white who I took to be the captain of the ship lay on the cold tiled floor in a pool of his own blood. The wide, empty, unseeing gaze of his dull blue eyes made my flesh crawl. Despite the fact that I wasn't squeamish, I had never seen a lifeless human being in reality, and frankly, I was unprepared. My heart stuttered as I saw the wicked cuts slicing his mouth into a ghastly fake smile. Only one criminal left his victims in such a state.

The voice suddenly came roaring back to me with the force of a wrecking ball, making my knees quake and threaten to give way. I was suddenly _very_ cold. My eyes crawled from the sight of the fallen captain and settled with horrified disbelief on the figure leaning against the steering wheel of the ship. My absolute worst fear was staring me in the face. His dark, wicked eyes swirled with unmistakable madness and disturbing amusement. He seemed slightly surprised at my unexpected entrance and dementedly pleased that he now had some company.

His agonizingly familiar face was coated with messily applied white makeup. Pools of dripping black surrounded his eyes, making them appear without a depth or limit. A smear red as blood accentuated the hideous scars ripping his mouth up into a permanent, sadistic smile. The captain's blood-spattered hat rested awkwardly atop his ragged mop of green hair. His signature violet suit enclosed him, his darkly patterned tie hanging limply against the steering wheel. I didn't miss the movement as his purple-gloved fingers tightened around the blood-smeared knife that he held as casually as if it were a set of keys.

"Well, hello _beautiful_…" the Joker murmured with sickening interest, the sound of his voice creeping from my most haunting nightmares to caress me like a set of ravenous claws.

The look in his eyes was frightening, seeing as it was both dangerous yet alluring. My heart trembled as his tongue trailed across his ragged crimson lips, making them gleam like hot, fresh blood in the warm tropical sunlight. Despite my frenzied prayers, he straightened against the wheel, his tousled green hair lolling messily in his face with his slightly uneven movements, and then came toward me with a slightly unbalanced gait. Questions for which I had no answers quickly shot through my panic-stricken mind: _When? How? Why?_ When had he gotten on the boat? How had he managed to captain it this long without anyone noticing? Why here? Why now? Why _me_? I couldn't help but realize how selfish I was in comparison to the dead captain. I could have been joining him very soon.

One thing was certain: I couldn't move. I was a deer caught in the headlights of a plane. Mouth gaping, eyes wide, body rigid as a plank, I could not react in any way whatsoever. Though senses of alarm, panic, and adrenaline pulsed through me with such speed and heat that I should have been able to bolt down the hall and jump over the railing of the ship like a hurdle before he had time to blink, my body as a whole refused to respond. His dark eyes swallowed me more and more the closer he came.

"Enjoying your cruise?" he asked, his tone ridiculously casual. My mouth spasmed as I tried desperately to form words. A red haze flared within my brain. The Joker's eyebrow rose as he scrutinized me. With all of the times I had unwillingly watched as he tortured a helpless victim on _Gotham Tonight_, it was so much more terrifying to be that victim in real life, to watch him move, smile, and laugh. His yellow teeth latched onto his lip as he fought weakly to control his unsettling giggles. My terrified expression seemed to amuse him beyond all reason.

"Well?" he asked with disturbing playfulness, though certainly desiring an answer, no matter how ridiculous. Reason welled with the fear racing all throughout my body.

"The cruise is… I didn't mean for the door to… I won't – I mean…" My breathing neared hyperventilation. The weak, quiet sound of my voice shocked me. I had never been so inarticulate in my life. Words were always mine to use at whim, but now they left me. What was there to say to him? He would not be reasoned or negotiated with. He couldn't be bought. There was nothing to threaten him with. He had absolutely no rules. That was painfully clear as he reached me and stopped, a vivid monument of terror leaning menacingly over me.

"You look _nervous_," he prodded, his voice nearing giddy with his repulsive excitement. When I didn't reply, he slowly began to circle me, as if observing what I looked like from a different view. My skin crawled beneath his gaze, causing a cold shiver to slip down the length of my spine. He leaned down to my eye level, causing my heart to race faster than its already-break-neck speed.

"Why so serious?" he asked threateningly, his mood abruptly changing again. I met his gaze, my lips trembling. Fear sparked hotly throughout my mind as I watched him raise the dark, lethal knife up to where I could see it all too clearly.

"Well, as much as I hate to, uh…_cut_ this short," he muttered into my ear, a foreboding, warning element in his frightening tone as he smiled gleefully at his own little joke. Seeing as his circle around me had, unknown to me, aligned him with the wall with me in between, he had a very easy path to prevent me from getting away. Unexpectedly, The Joker shoved me roughly up against the cool, furnished surface of the wall, making me gasp with fearful shock and shooting pain. He grinned happily at my terrified expression. Looking up at him with wide eyes, I felt his warm breath on my face. My feet dangled uselessly in the open air, his body being too close for me to aim a good kick. I couldn't breathe.

He leaned even closer, blocking out my view of anything else, and smoothly pressed the blade of the knife against my lips. My limbs throbbed with my rapidly pulsing blood. My lungs threatened to explode. My hands were clutched into painfully tight fists. I refused to scream, cry, or beg. He would kill me, and the least I could do was not make it any more amusing for him.

_He would kill me.  
_

The words slowly crawled through my hazy mind over and over again. It finally hit home that I was going to die. As he savored the horrific moment, the Joker's tongue trailed slowly across his lips, causing my eyes to watch the both terrifying and seductive movement. He noticed where my gaze currently and obviously focused.

"Curious, are we?" he growled with a chilling smile, his voice low and dangerous. As my face flushed hotly with fearful embarrassment, my eyes managed to settle upon his own. I wondered distractedly what he saw there. My impending demise was pretty important for consideration, and yet still I wondered if I was just like every other victim who watched him as he savored every little emotion that flew across their sweat-slick faces, watched the panic mount in their eyes, and saw who they truly where. Who was I truly? I had no time to ask.

"You _are_ beautiful…" the Joker murmured, almost to himself.

As he added slight pressure with the knife, just barely biting into the trembling flesh of my lower lip, the ship barreled headlong into the reef with all of the terrible force, agonizing pain, and utter destruction that I had imagined.

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Thanks again and Reviews are appreciated!


	2. A Series of Unfortunate Events

**Hey Everyone! Thank you so much for all of the favorites and alerts and for all of the wonderful reviews! I can't tell you how much it means to me as a writer! I appreciate all of your feedback and criticism and and support and encouragement. I'm certainly thrilled to update now!**

**I'd also like to know if you all have any thoughts about how I'm portraying the Joker or if anything seems unrealistic or far-fetched or if you have any ideas at all for the plot. Like I said, it's my first fan-fiction and I'm kind of making it up as I go, so I'd love to hear what you all think. Any and all feedback is welcomed. Thanks again, and I hope you like this new chapter!  
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**Disclaimer: The Dark Knight and the Joker belong to Christopher Nolan and DC Comics. I don't own them at all, really. I own my OC and my victims. :D**

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Tropical Torment Chapter 2

A Series of Unfortunate Events

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What happened next was a rushing blur of motion. The initial impact of the boat being disemboweled by the reef ripped it to a metallically groaning stop – and created a merciless hell of momentum-induced reactions. The Joker and I were tossed widely to my left and his right and sent tumbling down the hall. He laughed while I screamed. My world became a chaotic mass of hard surfaces, warped views, and total disorientation. My body was slammed with crushing force against the wall, making me gasp as the splitting agony shot through my aching limbs. The Joker was hurled against the wall beside me, the force no doubt knocking the wind from his lungs. None the less, breathless laughs shook his injured body. I was coherent enough to feel the disbelief that he could feel amusement at such excruciating pain.

The ship rocked, shifting the entire world of surfaces around us. I slid down the wall and fell to my hands and knees, gasping for my own stolen air. The Joker rolled to the floor, leaving a ragged imprint of his make-up coated face upon the wall, pulling himself awkwardly up onto his feet, his knife still clutched tightly in his purple-gloved fingers. I tasted the blood from my bleeding lip as I attempted to stand, bracing myself against the outwardly leaning wall.

_The ship was tipping. _

Horror flooded through me, washing my gasping mercilessly closer to hyperventilation. Screams began to echo from everywhere, from passengers thrown from the ship, trapped in their rooms, or experiencing any of the other numerous horrors of a shipwreck. The wood and metal groaned around me. I heard the distant rush of unforgiving ocean water, no doubt swallowing the bottom of the ship and working its steady way up. As I gasped, my body randomly exploded into motion - the desire to do anything, to run, to escape at all costs finally refusing to be ignored any longer. I stumbled forward, back toward the hall I had run down to encounter a crazed criminal mastermind to begin with. The Joker lurched after me, taking my hand in an unbreakable hold. His gloves were cold against my flesh.

"Time to abandon ship, beautiful," he informed me unnecessarily with another chilling smile, easily matching my panicked pace.

I didn't fight him off.

We ran.

And we weren't alone.

People, sobbing and shouting, struggled from their rooms, attempted to carry others, or simply let the hysteria devour them as they lie in plain sight and did nothing. The Joker and I soon blended with a panicked frightened flood of passengers. A woman recognized him in the fray, her face erupting into a mask of horror, a terrified scream ripping from her gaping mouth. Unfortunately, she stopped running and was soon overtaken violently by the people behind her. I didn't miss that the Joker smiled widely. I had no idea where in the ship I was, but my bearings returned when he suddenly yanked me sideways into the ship's control room. He dragged me to the intercom system and lifted the microphone to his ragged crimson lips.

"Would everyone who is…uh, _able_ please evacuate the ship and _swim_ to the nearest landmass to…await further instructions?" He glanced at me with a frightening gleam in his black eyes as I gaped at him in horror.

"Hurry now. This ship won't stay…_afloat_ for long…" He let the microphone fall to the ground as he laughed loudly, making me tremble as he dragged me away.

As we entered the hallway once again, I almost tripped over the trampled body of a young boy. Hysteria overwhelmed me to the point where I completely ceased to move, crumpling slightly to the ground. The Joker paused and glanced back at me at the sudden increase in my weight.

"Let's go, beautiful," he murmured with a smile, lifting me up and tossing me easily over his shoulder, resuming our previous pace.

"You're a small thing, aren't you?" he teased, still finding time to joke. Tears welled within my eyes but didn't quite spill over as I gazed at the receding, fragile, broken form lying upon the floor. I whimpered once, closing my eyes and shivering against the monster who had ended the short life of that little boy and so many other people still unknown to me. My hands were clamped into such tight fists, I thought my fingernails would impale my palms. My jaw was so rigid, it ached. Suddenly, propelled by an unidentified, molten force, I began to kick and scream, beating my fists against the Joker's back. He made a small exclamation of seemingly impressed surprise, experiencing difficulty with trying to hold me in place as I death-rolled like a crocodile. I fell from his shoulder and hit the ground running, scrambling wildly up the stairs and out into the blinding sunlight.

The sight that my eyes processed next would haunt my dreams for years to come.

The island, in all of its tropical, natural glory, loomed a short distance ahead, with its pristine white sands, emerald vegetation, and cerulean blue waters. Heaven on Earth. Right on the edge of Hell. The reef was the barrier, a dark perimeter in the sea around the massive landmass, and behind it was the ship. The ship with its prow smashed to smithereens. The ship with its deck slowly being swallowed by greedy, unforgiving waves tinted red in places from the blood of injured people. The surrounding sea was filled with debris, belongings, and drowning and dead passengers.

It was…chaotic.

Just what he wanted.

My stomach heaved with fearful revulsion, my mouth gaping in horror. I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, and couldn't scream even though I wanted desperately to. People fell, screamed, drowned, and died all around me, the sea heaving white with their struggles.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" a disgustingly familiar voice murmured eagerly right into my ear, "like _you_…"

I whirled to see the Joker smiling mischievously at me. His hand latched like the jaws of a venomous snake onto my arm and he began to toiling process of hauling me down the stairs and across the deck of the ship, toward the prow and the bloodied sea beyond. He took nothing with him and I was forced to leave my belongings behind. I struggled wildly but his grip was harsh, malicious, unyielding iron. I couldn't escape.

When we reached the edge of the ship, the broken railing loomed gnarled and open before me. I looked over the edge of the ship and immediately wished I hadn't. Not only where they filled with torn and tattered human remains, but the blood-stained waters were being cruised by a large, lethal, hungry shark. Its movements were wild and jerking as it no doubt entered a feeding frenzy. More would come soon. As I watched the ancient ocean predator glide quickly and precisely through the ruby water, I realized that I was more afraid of the Joker than of him. And I got the wonderful opportunity to _test_ those fears as the Joker casually pushed me over the edge of the ship and down into the churning waters below.

I was submerged with a splash, experiencing a moment of total disorientation as I righted myself in the bloody sea. My head broke the surface and a gasp burst from my lips as I struggled to calm myself and concentrate on swimming to shore. The Joker must've waited for me to surface before he jumped in because right then a large splash doused my already-soaking head and let a fresh wave of bloody, salty water wash into my eyes, nose, and mouth. I coughed and gagged, spitting disgustedly through my lips. I heard him swimming beside me.

"Shore's, uh, _this_ way, beautiful," he announced as he no doubt moved in the unknown direction. I forced my stinging eyes to open, seeing the Joker moving away from me toward the island, his suit a deep, malicious purple, weighed down by the water and giving him the sickeningly billowing look of some bloated sea monstrosity. The nearby beaches had already begun to fill with panicked, frightened, injured people. I calculated my chances of swimming away or of getting the shark to devour me first, ruled them as minimum, and then began the tiresome and torturous swim to a location I never wished to be. Nonetheless, a few minutes later, I was crawling, bloody, water-logged, and choking upon the pure white sand and collapsing beside the sodden and grinning form of the Joker, his make-up running grotesquely down his smug and scarred face.

At that moment I hated no one more than him.

He licked his lips and soaked up the chaos around him, giggling psychotically as the shark snatched an unfortunate, screaming young man down into the crimson water, his bleeding leg simply too tempting to pass up. I rolled over and coughed, spitting a small but no less disgusting amount of bloodied sea water upon the pristine white sand. The Joker grinned wickedly at me, his black eyes glinting in an unsettling manner, before he rose awkwardly to his feet and trailed his tongue across his lips yet again, as if it was as natural to him as breathing.

"Well, let's…uh, _welcome_ the passenger_-suh_…of the _Ocean Angel 5_ to a vacation they'll _never_ forget, hm? What say you, beautiful?" he asked creepily of me, staring down at my sodden, blood-soaked form as I shuddered upon the sand. I glared up at him, making him chuckle deep in his throat, once again unable to restrain his near-constant amusement. There was something demented in his black eyes, as if he liked what he saw sniveling in agony on the ground at his feet, what was left of me…

"Not _one_ chance…" I coughed, a few spots of blood flying from my trembling lips, "in…_Hell_," I snarled with as much hateful strength as I could muster, my hands digging like ravenous claws into the crimson-speckled sand.

A dangerous gleam flickered in the Joker's eyes, making my blood run cold as he dramatically wet his ragged, crimson lips again with his tongue. I shivered. He knelt down to my level and seized a handful of my long, ragged brown hair, roughly yanking my head back so that I had no choice but to look at him. He almost seemed to hum to himself as he drew the blood-streaked knife out of his pocket and pressed it with dangerous firmness to the trembling corner of my mouth. He now commanded my utmost attention as my heart raced in my chest. I was silent, my brown eyes wide and staring.

"Don't be that way, beautiful. I'd _hate_ to…uh, have to _**kill. you.**_ before my little game even _gets started_**.** I'm really, uh, _interested_ to see how you'll do... _So don't disappoin__**t**_," he murmured darkly and yet somehow temptingly in my ear, his breath hot against my skin, making me tremble. I normally would've made some blatantly sarcastic comment, but the way he spoke the last sentence… it was such a potent and lethal warning that my snarky attitude dried up in my salt-parched throat. He watched as the stubborn fight left my eyes and smiled with frightening satisfaction as he straightened and hauled me to my feet by the collar of my shirt.

He then dragged me along behind him toward the crowd of loudly conversing and panicking people clustering upon the beach. I struggled feebly, but my body was so tired from the terrifying swim to shore that I lacked the energy necessary to free myself. I just couldn't go with him willingly… I straightened as he stopped and released me, raising an automatic into the air and letting loose a loud, cracking shot. I started with surprise, the crowd before us reacting in a similar way, jumping and gasping with startled fear before falling completely silent.

"Good afternoon, _ladies and gentle-men_…" he started, extending his arms dramatically, the weapon he held glinting in his hand.

The crowd was horrifically silent, each and every one of them most likely recognizing the Clown Prince of Crime on sight. How could they not? His ghastly law-breaking deeds were known all over the world – and now we were all part of one. We'd all thought the same thing at one point or another while watching the news, safe in our homes or on our cruises: i_t won't happen to me. Not me. To dozens of others, but not me… _Oh, how wrong we'd been. He smiled a twisted, sadistic smile, accentuating his wicked scars, before he continued.

"It seems _you…_are the most worthy of the _Ocean Angel 5'_s passengers to partake in a little… competition that'll be held _righ__**t**__ here_ on this beach...hmm?" His purple-gloved fingers pointed downward at the blood-stained sand at his feet. He paused, saying his words slowly so that the message sunk in – burrowed deeply, viciously into each and every conscious mind to make itself painfully clear.

"Attempt to run or flee or whatever it is you think you can accomplish here, forget it _now_… because I'm afraid I've got an itchy trigger finger." His tongue trailed across his lips in an attempt to stifle his unsettling giggles. He waggled his painted eyebrows at the crowd, pointing the gun at a young man and then trailing the weapon across the gathered victims, making them flinch and whimper as he began to pace, pulling me along behind him.

"Now, the rules are simple…there are none…_excep__**t**_," he stopped, holding up his finger in accentuation of the catch to this brilliant little game of his, "_fight to the death_…"

My blood ran cold. My legs felt incredibly heavy, but the Joker's strength didn't let me collapse like I wanted to. He dragged me, faltering and staggering, behind him as if he didn't notice the fact that I was almost a dead weight – or a soon-to-be-dead weight. He straightened, facing the crowd with his head slightly tilted, his gloved hand gesturing to his chest.

"I. _won't. kill._ the las**t** remaining survivor. You can win your life by taking everyone else's..." His eyes widened in a mock effort to appear concerned, his already awkward posture becoming even more hunched, as if, by lowering himself to our level, he could somehow reach out panicked little minds more efficiently to make himself perfectly clear. "Now, don't worry... you won't, _uh_... have to _kill_. everyone else _just. like. that_... There will be, uh... a random order so that you can all _participate _and whittle your little group down to _one_," He straightened and clapped, releasing me and letting me sag as he basked in the devilish brilliance of his plan. The playful, childish gleam in his eyes slowly darkened, becoming menacing and predatory.

"And after that..." he smiled psychotically, "well, that's a bit of a surprise."

Every pair of eyes gawked at him with speechless horror, incomprehensible to such horrible thoughts.

My heart stopped beating for perhaps the tenth time that hellish day. And I was beginning to comprehend that this was just the beginning. I stared wide-eyed at the other people before me, some of them reminding me of panicked animals trapped in cold, twisted cages of fear, while others seemed concerned for the people around them, parents seeming to murmur to and attempt to comfort children, young couples clutching each other close, a person or two even looking at me with terrified pity in their eyes.

We all waited for the Joker to begin his sick little game. After all, he was the mass murderer with the gun. There was a pretty good chance that we would do what he asked. It was then that a man attempted to run, making a mad dash for the nearby cover of the dense, emerald forest. The crowd of surviving passengers gasped and screamed – and the Joker almost casually lifted his arm and fired his gun at a rather awkward angle, one that suited his overall ridiculously lop-sided personality but did next to nothing to hinder his aim.

A small crimson explosion of flesh and blood burst outward from the center of the man's back and, with a grunt, he dropped to the sand, lying still and silent in a moment. The Joker's black eyes scanned across the shuddering crowd once again, a challenge dwelling deep in their malicious depths.

"Anyone _else _got the balls to run?" he murmured darkly. I sensed he would prefer for his victims to play his game rather than making him kill them all with bullets, though I doubted that would stop him from killing each and every one of us. I shuddered at his side, my breathing uneven and weak. My head felt filled with nothing but air as well as with cold, hard lead at the same time. I thought I was swaying on my feet, but I wasn't entirely sure. I wasn't entirely sure of anything except for the fact that I felt like vomiting upon the pretty white sand.

Suddenly the Joker's cold, leather-clad hand took a tight grip upon my throat, his fingers digging in deep and making me choke as he turned me and tilted my head up to his so that I was facing him. My breath caught and bile rose in my throat, my brown eyes going wide with my immediate, seemingly perpetual terror. He smiled at me, his blood-red scars stretching with the ghastly movement.

"Let the _game_-_suh_..._**begin**_…" he murmured to me and only me, making my heart lurch sickeningly. His black eyes gleamed maliciously, and I shivered when a feeling of lethal knives caressing my clammy skin rippled all over my body. He turned away from me, addressing the crowd this time. He pointed his gun at two random people, a young man with short brown hair, probably in his twenties, and an older woman probably in her late forties or early fifties.

"You…and you….are our first two contestants… Front and…uh _center_, if you would _be. so. kind._"

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Thanks again, all my wonderful readers! Please Review! :3


	3. A Fight to the Death

**Aaahh! I can't tell you all how glad I am that you like this story! I wasn't really expecting much of a response, but it's certainly welcome! Thank you! Life's been hectic lately, so I'm sorry for the long delay before I updated. I'll try to correct that in the future. I also love to make things perfect, so you'll have to excuse my ridiculous dedication toward getting things exactly right. :D I hope you enjoy this next chapter. I think it is good considering how long it took me to finish it. Hahaha! Thanks again!**

**There's been some questions as to whether or not I've seen Battle Royale, seeing as this story seems to resemble it closely. I read a description/synopsis and I agree. :3 But I have never seen Battle Royale. I hope it's not too close to that story line, and I hope it's still enjoyable even though they're so similar.**

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**Disclaimer: I do not own The Joker or The Dark Knight. They're Christopher Nolan's and DC Comics'.**

**I do, however, own my OC and my nameless rabble of victims. :)**

Enjoy!

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Tropical Torment Chapter 3

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A Fight to the Death

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My world seemed to be slightly sedated – my attempts to shrivel up and die might have actually been working. I wasn't really sure, seeing as I was trying my best to stifle all coherent thought in my head. My nose was brushed by the scents of blood and gunpowder, of filth and sweat and fear. I was barely breathing to prevent the foul smells and tainted air passage into my aching lungs.

My ears seemed to be almost completely focused on the sound of my "mental submersion," that being the term I had assigned to my attempts to block out all of the screams and cries and gunshots and heavy thumps of bodies hitting the sand and chokes and gasps and gurgles that made a haunting, twisted melody of chaos, terror, agony, and death all around me. I focused on the sound of my own blood rushing through my head, wondering idly how long it would remain in my brain cavity, before that thought was stifled as well by the desperate fists of the metaphorical and mental protectors of my sanity.

I felt the blaring warmth of the tropical sun upon my pale, dry, salt- and blood-sprinkled flesh, felt the breeze gently playing with my hair – greatly out of context with my currently hellish situation, but welcome nonetheless. A caress from the Caribbean winds was far more preferred than the angry, merciless gales of a hurricane. The sand was also rather pleasantly heated against my legs where my weather-suited pants failed to cover them up, though of course it was starting to get into the many cuts and slashes all over my body, irritating and stinging. I tried very hard to block out the pain.

I tasted the salt of the sea in my mouth, as well as the blood from my injured lip and from the times I had screamed when people had died and some of their blood had managed to pass between my horrified lips, much to my dismay. The word …_Hepatitis…_ passed sluggishly through the restraints I had set up within my mind before being attacked and disposed of by my mental security guards.

_Can't have coherent thought, now can we, with this blood-bath of a situation..? _said a tiny, mocking but truthful little voice with both a touch of sweetness and a drop of venom in its tone within the frazzled, throbbing confines of my head. _It won't be long now before it's your turn. Any idea of who you'll be up against? What about that little boy in the front...if he's still there like he was before you decided to curl up and shut down? Could you kill him to save your own life? What about that big guy with the doe-eyed woman next to him..? You think he'd hesitate before killing you when her pretty little life was at stake?…_My head more or less spasmed for an instant, seeing as simply shaking it was just not sufficient to block out the hideous thoughts that had managed to break into the trembling, shriveling realms of my sanity_.. No. Stop it now._

Let's see… I covered touch, taste, sound, smell… Now sight. All I was able to perceive with my tightly-closed eyes was darkness. _Thank God._ I couldn't bear to watch anyone else die. I'd had my repulsive, disturbing fill for the day, that was for sure, even though I couldn't forget that it hadn't even been an hour since the Joker's first two chosen victims – or "worthy opponents" as he called them – had completed the first life-or-death bracket of his sick little game, the young man being the victor after strangling the woman to death after the giggling Clown Prince of Crime had pointed his gun at the man's children. There'd been so many deaths after that, I was beginning to lose track. _Again, thank God_.

People were dying right at that moment. Right in front of me. I was sure of it, despite my efforts to shut it all out entirely. I usually took pride in my ability to tune out annoyances and enter my own little world of safety and sanity and imagination and freedom, but not today. Today, I needed a mental strength that I simply could not muster. I needed a secret password that my mind just couldn't recall. Not only was I denied access, but I was also being made to suffer, shudder, and internally and externally scream.

I was getting strip-searched down to nothing at the gates of my happy place by the big, nasty, merciless gate guards named Sickening Fear and All-Consuming Terror. I was having every bit of my courage and hope and faith confiscated by them, having to watch everything that I was get locked away from me forever more while I was left, cold and naked and alone, upon the dry, barren, sweltering beach of an almost-deserted island. I was sitting in a broken, crumpled heap upon the sand at the edge of a competition of a ghastly sort of survival, instigated and directed by none other than the Joker himself.

And it was then that I was hurtled back to the painfully present reality by a shrill, horrified scream. Try as I might to swiftly rebuild the barriers I had attempted to construct around my mind, my senses were rebooted, my nose, ears, tongue, flesh, and eyes all working again in one agonizing transition from numb to live-wired. It was all thanks to that powerful soul-piercing cry that rose from the depths of a young woman's heart as what was no doubt her son was shoved into the sand by the large, burly man I had feared would take my own life to save that of his female partner.

_Why are they doing this?!_ I thought desperately as the sunlight made me squint as the woman continued to cry. My thoughts were a panicked, barely-coherent blur of words and emotions. I wasn't even entirely sure if what I was thinking was true or not. My fellow passengers were killing each other because the Joker wanted them to! What did they think they would get out of this?! Why would they take other people's lives when theirs was probably going to get taken away any minute now?! Why would they want their last moments alive to be filled with fear and submission and murder?!

What was _happening_ to them?! The Joker wasn't going to let any of us get away from this alive, so why were we playing his game and doing what he wanted when we were most likely going to die anyway? Why should we give in to him? He was most likely going to shoot any of us that weren't already dead in the end…or the last one standing got to partake in his sick little surprise?! What kind of ending prize was that?! If we were all going to die – or wish we were dead – in the end, why kill each other to get there?

I couldn't take it anymore. I didn't care what happened to me anymore. I was going to die, one way or another, and I didn't want to die a submissive, sniveling coward. I opened my eyes and stood up, swaying slightly on my feet as I took a good look at the scene before me. I realized that there were about thirty-something people left from the original almost-fifty that had managed to make it to the beach. The majority of the bodies were bleeding too much for strangulation or abuse – I realized that most of the people had died by gunshot, meaning more people than I'd first calculated from the edge of my sanity inside my trembling little walls of numbness had actually succumbed to his sick little game and killed people themselves to ensure their own safety or the safety of the ones they loved. Yes, I steadily recalled the gunshots and the screams and the sobs that had just managed to brush my coherency at the fringes of my shivering mind… I vaguely remembered the shaking refusals, the panicked denials, the despairing pleas, the quick footsteps that quickly ceased after a harsh crack rang out through the air… Perhaps they all had not been as weak and pathetic as I'd given them credit for… Still, some hadn't been so noble. That was unbearably clear as the little boy's struggles lessened beneath the iron grip of the burly man. I noticed tears in the man's eyes, but he still wasn't stopping. Well, I was beyond my limits for dealing with this hellish situation. I wouldn't and couldn't take it anymore. With all of the volume and force I could muster, I opened my mouth and screamed, "STOP!" I screamed to anyone and everyone who would listen, or even register the transfer of sound. I screamed for them, for me, for all.

The man smothering the little boy looked up at me, his movements slowing to a stop while his victim continued to struggle weakly in the stronger grasp, succumbing to the lack of oxygen found in the blood-stained grains of sand no doubt filling his eyes, nose, and mouth. Many people looked at me all at once. Their combined gazes, so fearful and broken and confused and weak, settled upon me with an incredible emotional weight, something I believe would be safe to say was felt in the very center of my soul. Parents looked up from comforting children. Strangers looked to me for help and guidance, for the strength they couldn't find at the moment. Couples, old and young, clutched each other close as they looked at the one who had mustered the courage and volume to scream with all of the emotion she was feeling even though she was terrified of the consequences. They all were. No one was enjoying this – except _him_.

I then switched my gaze from the crowd of victims to the gruesomely painted man who had made us plummet to such a state…but mostly not without our own consent. We were only as weak and pathetic as we allowed ourselves to be… but the creepy clown waving a gun around certainly didn't help us fortify our physical or mental defenses or find a burst of self-confidence in such a time of peril or even protest his terrorism effectively… until now? I realized what I had done, then, standing up and ceasing his horrific hour of fun if only for a moment. He was looking at me and only me, the black smears around his eyes making his gaze seem to suck me into depths of darkness from which I could never escape. He had been greatly amused by the proceedings up until that point, maybe a little disappointed that I'd interrupted them, but then again…there I was, standing up and out for all to see, a clearly intriguing prospect for his mental consideration concerning what he would make happen next. _Good God…_

I was once again his target, his experiment, his play thing… A wave of nausea washed over me when he licked his lips dramatically, making them gleam like the fresh blood that stained the sand in the sunlight, and I almost fell to my knees. Sure, it wasn't like he'd forgotten I was there, but at least before I hadn't been the center of his murderous attention. I had a bought of selfishness, wondering in a panicked surge why I'd felt the need to stand up at all, why I'd dared put myself in harm's way for other people. My bottom lip trembling, my wide brown eyes slid over to the man still holding the little boy, who had now gone still. His mother was sobbing a few feet away. I swallowed roughly, holding the man's gaze and willing him with all I had in me to stop the chaos, stop the madness, find his humanity within him and hold fast to it, so that instead of plummeting into darkness, we all might leave this world with even a bloody sliver of our dignity intact.

The Joker waited, watching me.

"…Let him go," I murmured softly to the man, my voice trembling with my own foul weakness, my eyes darting over to the Joker's when the hideous man smiled dangerously at me. I'd just made his game more interesting. Sure, it was great to watch people kill each other, but now, there was a force opposing that… And when there was an opposing force, there was something to collide with, something to overpower, something to overcome and seduce and ravage and destroy. I gulped again, barely comprehending the change in the man's expression as his grip on the little boy slackened. Slowly, the child lifted himself off of the sand with trembling arms, soon coughing and spitting out blood and grains of sand, his face effectively coated in both substances. His mother choked on a sob, holding out her arms to him and saying what I expected was his name, though it was in a language I didn't understand. The boy, sniveling and hacking and crying, stumbled up from where he had lay in the sand and ran over to his mother, collapsing with shaking sobs in her arms. The two cried together while everyone else waited.

The man seemed to realize what he'd almost done, looking down presumably at his hands in utmost horror. The reactions of the victims apparently sparking his sadistic curiosity, the Joker allowed his black eyes to crawl away from my face to settle upon the various members of the crowd in quick, two-second glances, evaluating all of their actions and reactions as he waited with a creepish, childlike eagerness for everyone to respond to the ceasing of the current tournament match of death. The man looked up at him, his face glistening with sweat and fear, and he then began to move slowly, almost in a frightening dream, back toward the woman he'd been killing to protect. She didn't look at him when he arrived somewhat-safely at her side, and he only looked at her for a moment before hanging his head and crying more vocally than before. She took his hand tightly in her own, but did nothing more, as if she was still trying to come to terms with what her love had almost done for her, her eyes straying to the crying mother and child before finally settling on the crying man at her side. She seemed to forgive him and realize that it really didn't matter what happened next. She curved her arm around his shoulders and held him as he cried, her eyes meeting the Joker's for only a moment before closing.

It was then a shot rang out, cracking like thunder in the delicate silence. I jumped a foot off of the ground, the little bubble of "no one is currently dying" shattering like lethal, glistening glass shards around me as my eyes widened, incomprehensible and staring in mute horror. The woman's large, round doe eyes, after slowly opening, now began to darken, as if a hellish vacuum were sucking the light away from them. Her bottom lip trembled, blood welling out of her mouth and dribbling down her pale white chin. Her hand slackened and fell from the crying man's shoulders, and she slowly dropped to the sand, a ragged crimson hole in her chest. The man choked on his tears, his hands dropping and his body stiffening rigidly, his eyes searching for the one he loved and settling with unbelievably heart-breaking weight upon her dead body beside him. The world seemed to slow down, like it was a cold, unfeeling machine that seemed to be malfunctioning more and more as the day went on. The Joker's automatic pistol still smoked, his previous warning carried through: _kill the boy or I'll kill your woman. _It was as simple – and horrible – as that.

The man couldn't contain himself any longer. His eyes welled over with a continuous stream of tears, a heart-wrenching scream of agony and pain punching forth from his chest as he dropped to the sand beside the woman he lived. With shaking hands he clutched her body close, sobbing into her bloody chest as the crowd, myself, and the Joker all watched him. We couldn't bear to look away. The Joker didn't want to. Almost casually, he lifted his gun and blew at the smoking tip, dispersing the soft grey cloud in an instant, as if he were part of an old Western movie and had just successfully won a valiant shoot-out. I turned, gaping at him in speechless horror and repulsion. He wasn't valiant – hell, he wasn't even socially acceptable in any way whatsoever! Tears welled within my own eyes, my emotions getting out of control as I expressed my indignant fury and my mournful sorrow and my sickening fear all at once. My hands clenched in fevered fists, my enter body being racked by shivers that were slowly mounting in frequency and feeling. For the second…or third, I wasn't sure, I was losing track and I didn't care – for the whatever-number-th time that day, something inside of my snapped.

I ran at the Joker, a furious, panicked heat flaring within me, driving me faster and crazier than before. My long fingernails would suffice nicely for clawing his make-up-smeared eyes out. My hair started to tangle all around my head and I screamed at him like an animal when he turned to look at me, his black eyes sparking. I heard various people in the crowd gasp, some even cheering me on, though most were too shocked and afraid to do anything of any real consequence or notice. I lunged for his face, just as he lifted the gun. Then things happened a little too fast for me to process in my rage.

My course of direction was changed. The world was a blur of blue and pale white and slightly searing golden light. There was great pain from something blunt slamming into my side and knocking the wind out of me and even more pain from something tightly encircling me as I continued to move in a fast circle through the air. Still, it was nothing like a bullet wound, so I was fairly certain that he hadn't shot me. And then I got a better handle on what was happening to me. The Joker had moved at the last minute, grabbing me and spinning me around to redirect my momentum and protect himself, slammed the butt of his gun into my ribcage, and was now restraining me in his arms, the barrel of the gun jammed up beneath my jaw and pushing my head so far back to the point where tears of pain pricked at my eyes.

My annoyance at being so unable to fight back against him would have known absolutely no boundaries or limits, if I hadn't been focused on how close I was, yet again, to dying. My back was pressed uncomfortably close against his chest, his arms encircling my front, holding me almost off of the ground, my legs straining to find any sort of leverage or support in the sand below my feet. I felt his warm breath upon my neck, seeing as it was so exposed because of the gun jammed up beneath my chin, stretching my face up toward the blaring sunlight as sweat broke out upon my brow. My heart pounded in my ears. I attempted to refrain from gasping for breath, but my breathing was still ragged and weak. I felt disgustingly pathetic as I heard him chuckle darkly in my ear. I was such a failure – such an irrational, uncontrollable failure. I couldn't even _die trying_ correctly.

I continued to struggle, attempting to free myself, though the heat and exhaustion, both mental and physical, of all that I'd been through was weakening me more and more with every passing second. I still wanted to claw his eyes out, and that helped me to not give up just yet. His strength was too much for me and he only tightened his grip upon me, wrestling me into submission as he whispered wickedly in my ear.

"Y'know," he exhaled heavily, licking his lips far too close to my skin, "you _migh__**t**_, uh, have a _little more figh__**t**_than I, uh, gave you _credit_ for, beautiful…" I felt the smile in his voice like a blind person in a garden would feel when they accidentally picked up an overgrown slug instead of a flower.

"Though, I'd be a _little _more, uh, _care-ful_, if I were you…It _migh__**t**_. jus_**t**_. be…the _death_ of you, some-day…" he murmured darkly to me, his tone once again containing a potent but amused warning. As I struggled to remain calm and not give him any more enjoyment – or any more reason to hold me tighter – I felt the pressure beneath my jaw lessen as he removed the gun from its lethal position. His arms pulled away all at once and I fell roughly to the sand, stumbling to my feet and taking a few quick steps away from him. Dang it, why couldn't I stop shuddering? The sun was warm against my skin, but that did nothing to make the icy goosebumps disappear…

"Oh, Beautiful?" he murmured in a repulsive sing-song voice, injected with something that I supposed was supposed to be a friendly tone, as if he were calling a close, childhood friend over to play Frisbee or something. It made me shudder again, despite my efforts not to. The crowd looked on, many of them watching me, clutching their loved ones close as the man and the mother and child continued to cry, not quite as loudly as before… Slowly, unwillingly, I looked up and met the Joker's gaze, doing my best to swallow any other emotions and clearly display my hatred for him, letting my fiery, loathing eyes bore into his with all of the hostility I could muster. I didn't speak, didn't give any other acknowledgment that I was responding to his creepy call. He simply grinned at me, his blood-red scars stretching with the movement, his yellow teeth gleaming in the suddenly-harsh sunlight. Suddenly and without warning, he moved toward me, making me flinch and curl in on myself in fearful surprise. When he reached me, he wrenched me up into a straight-standing position, seizing a handful of my long brown hair and pulling back, making me lift my head as I gasped at the pain. He then drew my hands up and shoved the gun into my shaking, sweat-slick grasp. Ice slipped down my spine as he forced me to take aim at the crumpled form of the crying man, still obliviously holding his dead loved one.

"You're up, beautiful," he murmured hotly into my ear.

Tears prickled into my eyes, my breath caught, my heart rate quickened, and the guards of my happy place simply smiled like demons and waved back at me.

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Thank you all once again!

Hugs from me – and from the Clown Prince of Crime, if you aren't too concerned about dying. :)

Reviews are certainly appreciated!


	4. The Final Shot

**Hey guys! I'm ba-aaaack! Sorry it took so long! I got swamped with the end of school and with a bunch of other writing projects, but I managed to kick this out before too long. I hope I didn't lose any readers in the process. It's summer now, but I think I'll finish two more projects before I continue this one. I know I made it sound like this wouldn't be my top priority at the moment in one of the Author's notes of my other story, **_**Safe and Warm**_**, but I was hit with inspiration and the words just kept coming. And they wouldn't be denied. :)**

**(And don't worry, the other two projects shouldn't take too long. One more chapter of **_**Safe and Warm**_** and one of a brand new story that's on its way to completion. I hope you'll like those, too.)**

**So, here is the next chapter of Tropical Torment. I must say, I like this one a lot. ^_^ I hope all of my readers like it too, and don't mind waiting a bit for the next one. Thank you for all of your support and your wonderful reviews. You all help make it worth it. :3 It's a pleasure to write for you as well as for myself when you tell me what you think.**

**Criticism is as welcome as compliments. :D**

**Disclaimer: I don't own the Joker – though I wish I did – or Batman or anything besides my narrator and my victim rabble. Credit for **_**The Dark Knight's**_** awesomeness goes to DC comics and Christopher Nolan.**

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Tropical Torment Chapter 4

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The Final Shot

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My hands felt numb around the gun, my finger slack and unmoving against the trigger. The broken-hearted man, my forcibly-chosen target, was still sobbing into the bloody chest of the woman he loved, after the Joker had shot her because he had failed to kill a little boy only minutes before. The painted man who had caused all of this pain was standing just behind me, his purple-gloved hands still holding my own poised at the pathetic victim he had chosen for me. I could still feel his breath repulsively warm against my throat. His proximity was terrifying, but I fought hard not to let it get to me. I couldn't afford to get distracted when another human life hung so precariously in the balance that I was trying to maintain.

The little boy I'd temporarily "saved" still resided in his mother's warm, tight, panicked embrace as the two of them continued to sob. The rest of the crowd released its occasional sniffles and cries, though the vast majority of them were shivering and silent. They were waiting. Waiting to see what I would do. Waiting to see what I would do with the gun in my hands, pointed at the broken-hearted man who still obliviously clutched his lost love. The sun suddenly seemed to blare down upon me, as if chastising me for the most unspeakable crime, as if I'd already killed the man and it was letting me know how horrible of a person I was. It wasn't a completely misplaced sense of disappointing wrong-doing, seeing as I'd sat by and attempted to disappear while many other people died only a few minutes earlier, so it wasn't like I was a gallant example of flawless integrity and virtue this afternoon.

But still, it was maddening as the drops of sweat began to gather upon my forehead and dribble lazily, with salty, heavy warmth down the pale, clammy skin of my face. My bottom lip trembled feverishly, and I bit it in an attempt to restrain it as well as myself. Flames flickered between the discs of my spine – my body was hideously alive and aware and on fire. It seemed to shock straight to the nucleus of each of my cells to realize that I truly and completely held, in my shaking hands, the potential to end a human life. Now, I knew there were more ways to kill people aside from guns, but guns were often seen as some of the most infallible, especially when your target was actually hit. People survived gunshot wounds quite often, though I suspected they survived fist-beatings much more often than bullet holes.

I'd wondered before, during the more uneventful periods of my life when such an opportunity to test my wonderings had seemed entire universes away, if I'd be capable to kill another human being if my life depended on it. I wondered if I possessed the strength of muscle and mind to actually accomplish such a terrible act. Now, I felt more like the answer was "yes" than I ever had before. I'd never held a gun before. I'd never aimed it at another human being. I'd never thought that this cruise for writing a book would lead to anything aside from rest, relaxation, and worldly rewards. And now, here I stood on a beach, the Joker just behind me, the crushing weight of his black eyes just pressing down upon me, silently daring me to pull the trigger of the gun he'd given me to kill yet another member of his nameless rabble of poor, unfortunate victims.

I guessed that "never's" didn't always stay "never's" for very long.

I blinked my eyes to clear them of the heated, hazy fog brought on by terror and the blaring sun overhead. I practically had a slimy coating of sweat lying with sickening weight against my skin. Every breath seemed to be a laborious effort, but it was worth it to get oxygen to my brain so I could think. For the moment, the Joker seemed content to wait for me to act, sadistically curious of what I would do. I could hear him breathe behind me, occasionally humming some quiet, disjointed, disturbing tune to himself. The weight of his eyes was suffocating, but I still fought to remain clear-headed despite the hideous knowledge of how he was still mere inches away from me. Needless to say, the Clown Prince of Crime was _far_ too close, but perhaps there was something useful in that fact...

What was he thinking about? Was he expecting me to shoot the man, like he'd obviously directed me toward doing? Or was he expecting me to try to rebel against his wishes and try something to escape...? Was there any chance of me being fast enough to run away from him? I had his gun after all... Could I get far enough away from him...to shoot him? To at least prevent him from causing any more damage by putting _his_ life at stake? There was a chance I could save everyone else here with the ludicrous efforts I was contemplating beneath the brain-baking sun... If I couldn't get away from him, could I use the gun right where I was? Could I hit him with the butt of the gun and knock him out? Could I reach back and shoot him accurately? ...Could I shoot _myself_ before he could stop me? I shivered in the tropical warmth, a rush of coldness ripping through me and making my knees tremble. No – Well... If I couldn't kill someone else, could I kill myself? _Would_ I? It didn't seem right – the ultimate cop out... I would leave them all here at his mercy if I ended my own life...

No, I couldn't do that. I hadn't made so many statements of valiance and justice to up and kill myself now and leave them all behind to fend for themselves... My brow lowered in my concentration, my eyes squinting through the blaring light of the airborne fireball high above me. I stared at the broken-hearted man before me, still hunched and crying into the bloody chest of the woman he loved, whom he'd been willing to kill to protect... His sobs seemed to draw back and kick viciously at my frazzled consciousness, each one making my heart break a little more. I didn't want to shoot him. I thought the statement a few more times just to make it sink in. It made me feel a little better for some reason, as if the simple addressing of the fact that I had some tattered remains of a moral backbone was somehow comforting to me.

So, if I didn't shoot him, then what would I do? What _could_ I do? I flexed my fingers carefully around the gun, repositioning my sweat-slick grip. I wasn't sure why I was bothering to hold onto it. Part of me thought that, if someone should have it, it should be me. I didn't know what would happen if I gave it to someone else – maybe they would be stronger and smarter than me, but there was also the chance that they would be weaker. And that was a chance I wasn't sure I was ready to take. Another part wondered how it would feel to just drop the damn thing right there into the hot, blood-stained sand. Yet another part was considering chucking it into the ocean. The options were overwhelming, and my lack of experience with fighting for my life and fighting with a gun certainly hindered my judgment in deciding which one was best to proceed with... I was terrified, exhausted, and frustrated – and the Joker knew it.

"...You know, _beautiful_...You, uh, _could_ just _fire_ – _the_ – _gun_ and then you can just..._go_ _back_ to your _**little**_ _**heap**_ on the sand" – My eyes twitched as I saw his gloved hand wave with absent-minded spasticity in the general direction of where my shapeless imprint in the sand still vaguely remained – "And then, your turn's _up_... _Jus__**t**__. Like. Tha__**t**_..." he murmured, his voice like a maniacal disease spreading throughout my body. My teeth clacked together as I gritted them in an attempt not to shudder violently in response to his repulsive proximity. His breath felt hotter than the sun on my neck, making fresh beads of sweat well to sluggish life upon my skin. My fingers twitched around the gun as I fought for control over my fears.

"But then you would _win_..." I hissed back at him without looking at him, still trying to ignore how close he was to me and how close I was to killing someone...

"...You're _so sure_ that getting you to..._kill_ _someone_...is my _goal_..?" he asked in a low, evilly superior murmur that made me question almost every conclusion I'd managed to form about him in the brief time I'd been in contact with him – I wasn't so sure anymore, though my mind didn't doubt that, whatever his goal was, it involved death and me at this point. One way or another...

He chuckled when I didn't answer, the sound prickling across my back. It felt like the claws of a vulture as it tried again and again to lift my near-dead body up but was repeatedly unsuccessful. I couldn't help but stiffen, though I tried to not let it travel down my arms anywhere near the gun. Tense fingers weren't good around triggers that one didn't want to pull.

"..._Goals_ are _overra__**ted**_..._You_ should know _that_. I mean..._look where __**yours**__ got you_," he announced, his voice rising so that the last phrase was almost a harsh proclamation of the failure of my short life's work and the death of all of my dreams. I had to grit my teeth to control myself. How dare he act as if this was my fault! How dare he waltz like the mentally-unstable clown he was right into my lovely life and say how all of the goals I had planned for myself didn't matter! Perhaps they weren't the top priority at this point, I silently admitted that, but that certainly didn't mean having a goal was worthless or that mine had always been destined to lead me here! My current goal right then was, at its core, to survive, but it also would have been nice to be able to prove him wrong in the process somehow... The sun didn't seem so hot anymore, simply because I wasn't as cold with fear – I was angry with indignation at how he'd made it seem like I messed up, when it was really just him messing me and everyone else up.

"My goal didn't get me here – yours did," I informed him angrily, though I immediately regretted allowing emotion into my voice. That had to be a painfully clear indicator that he was getting to me, and that had not once crossed my mind associated with the phrase "good idea..." The man my weapon was aimed at was falling quiet now, as if his grief just wasn't able to be vocalized. I could see that the dead woman's bloody shirt was also soaked with tears. He sniffled pathetically against her, a ruin of a man. And my gun was still pointed at him as the Joker replied to my snapped statement with a casual and creepy tone.

"...Do I _really_ _seem_ like the kindda guy with a _**goal**_..? I mean...just the _**word**_ sounds _**wrong**_ in my mouth, _wouldn't you agree, beautiful..._?"

The entire question made me want to shudder, especially when I unwillingly started thinking of things being in his mouth – his twisted, scarred smile stretching wider, opening with a spurt of blood, yawning as it engulfed all that was good and pure in the world. My mind imagined it laughing in the dark, imagined it chewing, imagined it sliding across sweat-slick flesh... The shudder I'd been attempting to stifle racked my body, refusing to be ignored. My face warmed again, this time with an involuntary blush.

"...There are _**all kinds**_ of things wrong with this day..." I responded with a harsh but hushed voice, not wanting to reveal to him anything about what I'd just thought of or just how disturbed I was by this entire situation. That would be too much information for him to have concerning me, of that I was certain.

And then he laughed.

Not softly. Not quietly. Not carefully. Not considerately. _NO_.

He practically exploded with laughter just behind me. The hideously violent sound burst from his mouth with almost enough force for me to feel it on my neck. It was like a mercilessly excruciating slap to my terrified, hyper-active consciousness. And what do you do when you get slapped and you are so far beyond _not expecting it_ that _expecting it_ is nothing but a dot to you? You jump, that's what. And when I jumped a foot in the air and sucked in a painfully fast gasp with my utter shock, my fingers tightened around the gun in a terribly reflex reaction.

And then I felt it.

I felt it before I heard it.

The..._push_. The gun pushed against my hand. It was a small push – but a push nonetheless. My mind worked slowly, as if I were thinking in slow-motion. The sun blared. The world froze. And the gun pushed. My hands moved back a little to accommodate the movement, though it still seemed to travel throughout my body by knocking each one of my cells together, one after the other...

The gun didn't just push.

It _recoiled_.

_Because I fired it._

Then I heard it.

The loud crack that seemed to scare my soul out of my body. It smashed into my ears and tackled my brain and crushed my lungs. It shook me to my core. I fired it. I fired the gun. _I just – __**fired**__– __**the**__– __**gun**_.

Horror draped me like an unbelievably heavy, blood-soaked curtain.

It was soaked with blood because that was what I had just shed.

I'd just shed blood.

I'd just shot someone.

_I'd just killed._

I gaped, silently screaming. My eyes burned, as if they were on fire. I couldn't even think of why they burned. All I could do was watch the blood droplets rapidly expelled from the wound I'd just created glint like repulsive jewels in the sunlight. All I could do was watch the grieving man lurch slowly downward as a bullet – _my bullet_ – tore through his abdomen, making his entire body jerk toward the body of the woman he loved and toward the ground beneath him. All I could do was watch him fall. _Because of me._

Somehow, tears were streaming like liquid flames down my petrified face. Somehow, my lips were trembling. Somehow, every part of my body was shivering and swaying. Somehow, my shallow breathing became repeated examples of horrible, broken sobbing. Somehow, I shattered.

Every pair of eyes in the vicinity was on me. All of the people I'd failed were staring at me, gaping at me, their eyes wide and disbelieving.

_She was the good one, the brave one. She prevented him from killing that man, and then...she killed him herself. _

Pieces of me clattered against the sand, glinting like jagged knives of a broken human in the hellish sun's light.

_She just killed someone. She is no better than him. We were wrong. _

The pieces fell faster now, chinking and splintering on top of each other as they piled up in a glistening pile of ruin.

_She can't save us. She's a murderer. _

The pieces were glistening shards of deadly rain now, pouring and pouring relentlessly down to the unforgiving earth.

_We were wrong..._

I was shattered.

I heard what the gathered crowd of my fellow-castaways thought of me now, what judgment-calls they were making. I'd let them down. I'd let each and every one of them down... They had been looking to me for help and guidance. They'd been looking at me for hope. AND NOW LOOK AT ME!

I couldn't tear my eyes away from the man. He was silent now, completely. He was utterly still, only his hair and clothing swaying occasionally in the weak tropical breeze. He was lying thoughtlessly upon the body of the woman he had loved, the two of them still and silent and bleeding together.

_He was dead._

_I had taken his life – __**me**__._

Whatever the hell the Joker's "non-existent" goal had been, I was pretty sure he'd achieved it.

I was pretty sure he had won – and I had lost...

I lost _so much_ right then...

I dropped to my knees in the sand in front of the Joker, unable to control myself or restrain my crushing grief. I couldn't hold myself up anymore. I didn't deserve to stand up strong and tall after what I'd done... My hands shook without any conscious direction from my brain, as if my body were trying to reject the weapon I held. My shuddering escalated until the gun slipped from my limp, unfeeling fingers and puffed quietly into the sand before me. I didn't look at it. I didn't look anywhere else but at the dead man before me. He was dead because of me. I was the one who had made him a body, a simple hunk of meat, no longer a thinking and feeling and loving human being...

_**Good God, what have I done...?**_

My tears darkened the sand upon impact after plummeting from my pale face, splattering the tiny grains and clumping them together with the moisture. Every breath was an effort, my chest seeming to constrict itself as time dragged on and as the image of the man I'd killed was further burned into my brain. I knew that, if I closed my eyes, I would probably still be able to see him, see how he'd once been, – _and_ _hear the Joker's __**maniacal laugh**_...

I stared with glazed, searing eyes before me, not really seeing anything anymore. My thundering heartbeat and jagged breathing blocked out most sounds, the murmurs and whimpers of the crowd around me. The world became a little distorted, seeing as I was beginning to rock back and forth repeatedly. The sun set me on fire, but I didn't feel it. I was aware of the heat beating down upon my sweat-slick skin, but I didn't care like I had before. I didn't care about anything right then. I was attempting to slither back into my happy place like I'd been in before, attempt to forget this hell that I was now undeniably a part of and curl up into my little heap on the sand.

_Just like he said I could – Just like he __**knew**__ I __**would**__._

He hadn't gasped or started when I'd shot the man. He'd almost seemed to expect it – I couldn't be entirely certain, seeing as I knew that my world exploded right then and I wasn't able t accurately monitor his face or body for reactions, seeing as he was behind me at the time. But still, it hardly seemed relevant... He'd given me that choice from the beginning, as soon as he'd shoved the gun into my hands, and I'd accepted it just like he always expected me to, one way or another. He knew that, if I didn't cave myself, he could probably crush me into submission by playing with my fears or by scratching at my moral spine until it bled and broke. He knew... _He always knew._

_Like __**HELL**__ he didn't have a goal!_

I closed my eyes and lowered my head. The guards to my happy place were back, cracking their enormous, bloated knuckles threateningly. They slammed punch after punch into my face, into my body, mind, and soul. They beat me down into a bloody pulp, a sniveling, shivering mass on the harsh, cracked, merciless ground. They wouldn't let me in. I could find no solace and no relief. There was nowhere for me to hide, seeing as I was what I was trying to hide from. I couldn't run from myself and I couldn't defeat myself. I was my own worst enemy in this tropical torment.

I was just like the Joker now – _a murderer_.

"..._Look at me_..."

The voice whispered, flowing like burning oil into my ears and washing against my baking brain.

I didn't move, didn't open my eyes, didn't look up, didn't even _breathe_...

"_**LOOK – AT – ME**_!"

My flesh trembled as if it would fall of my bones at the sudden fury in his voice. I was unable to refuse or resist him. Terrified, I started upon the sand and whipped my head up to look at him.

My hair, tangled and wet with sweat, stuck to my face in vision-obscuring streams.

My pale, clammy skin shone sickeningly in the blaring sunlight.

My chapped white lips were parted, shallow breath dashing chaotically in and out of my mouth.

My brown eyes, heavily-glazed with the inescapable terror of a child that was beyond consolation, were wide and glistening with tears as I met his gaze.

His black, vile, gaze, filled with a chaotic darkness that could consume the light, all of it...

He _knew_ evil. He could _see, hear, speak, smell, taste, and touch_ evil. _**He was evil**_.

And then he smiled at me.

That hideous, loathsome, painted nightmare _smiled at me_.

It was the most horrible smile I had ever seen. It was more horrible then all of the others.

His scars twisted and writhed, the marred flesh stretching upward, climbing endlessly upward... The redness smeared into the white, the black dripping into all of it and making it a montage of repulsively sodden color. It was blood and shadow tarnishing purity. It was the ruin of all of the goodness in humanity's heart. His long yellow teeth were bared in a truly horrifying grin, the sadistic smile of Beelzebub, of Lucifer, of Satan, of every earthly embodiment of evil. His gums glistened like blood in the sun, as if his mouth were full of it, full of the life essence of the innocent that he'd chewed and swallowed. His entire face became a ghastly portrait that deserved to be shredded and burned and buried and nuked.

_And it was all for me._

He smiled...because he liked what he saw.

He liked my frazzled hair and parted lips and terrified eyes.

He liked what I had become – what I had been so hideously reduced to.

I'd _killed_ someone – _He'd made me kill someone_ – and he _loved_ what it was doing to me, if the Joker was even remotely capable of something that could be called love.

He loved what was left of me, because it was probably cruelly beautiful to him, like a master of pain and suffering and destruction admiring his unwilling apprentice's unfortunate accomplishments.

He smiled.

And it violently overcame me like no other inner, snapping impulse had done before.

In an instant, I was ravaged and beaten and hurled into oblivion.

A jagged gasp burst from my lips, as if he'd thrown a fist into my chest with all of the strength he could muster. His smile hit me like a wrecking ball. It was the final push over the edge. He approved of me, of what I'd done and what it had done to me, and that was it. That was all I could bear.

I lurched to my feet, wheezing for air and melting beneath the sun, the sand kicking upward beneath my rapidly scrambling movements, my heart throbbing, my blood pulsing in my ears and behind my stinging eyes, my hair whipping heavily around my face as I ran.

I ran away from the Joker.

I ran away from the crowd I had let down.

I ran away from the man I'd killed, and from the gun I'd dropped.

I ran, because it was all I could do.

I ran, a cowardly, shattered, pathetic murderer, into the surrounding emerald foliage and out of sight.

XxX

XxX

XxX

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**Well, there's that one!**

**Hope you all liked it!**

**Read and Review!**

**And **

**THANK YOU!**

**Love from me - and the Joker...in his sick, sadistic way. :)**

**~SD  
**


	5. Flight then Fight

**Hey guys! I'm back with another chapter! I just can't figure out how to best finish all of the writing projects I've got going. I keep trying to just plow through one of them at a time, and yet I keep getting distracted with a different one before I'm done. Oh well. I know this one is one of my more popular stories, so I guess I don't mind taking a break from my other projects to update this one. I'm getting further and further away from my plans as the plot progresses, so the next few chapters may take a little while longer with how I need to think of things to happen next. Oh well. Come what may! :)**

**Thanks again! Please read and review! Reviews = love. :3**

**Disclaimer: I don't own the Joker. He belongs to DC comics and Christopher Nolan. My OC and my dwindling rabble of victims are mine to command.**

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Tropical Torment Chapter 5

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Flight then Fight

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The leaves whipped against my face like emerald knives as I ran. I couldn't tell if I was actually getting cut and bleeding because of my contact with them, but they sliced across my overly-sensitive skin with enough poignancy to make it not matter to me either way. My feet pounded in an uneven, jerking rhythm across the sandy ground, the occasional fallen stick or sharp stone stabbing into my toes and doing nothing to slow me down. My breath seemed to rake my tongue as it scraped in and out of my mouth, my body so exhausted and yet so determined to keep going until I couldn't go anymore.

The forest stretched around me in all directions. I could've seen blips of sea and sky if I'd cared to look through the dense tree boughs and trunks. I could've recalled that there was so much more world out there than this little, unknown island. But nothing like that mattered right now. I didn't have a destination. I didn't have a goal. I was a shattered human being, and I was just trying to run away from myself even though I was nothing more than a pile of shattered morals and broken endeavors.

My face was hot with the liquid fire that was the burning trails of my tears. The air was cool but still suffocating as I ran, the breeze seeming to stick to my sweat-slick skin and slow me down, as if I were trying to barrel through a field of thick, sucking slime. I felt like I was choking, even though I knew I was breathing with a laborious but worthwhile effort. I shook my head to get my tangled, salty hair out of my eyes, finding the visual impairment no longer tolerable. The movement was more disorientating than I'd planned with my speed and lack of stability, and I was forced to finally slow down and stumble to a stop against a rough, crooked palm tree so that I didn't topple messily to the ground. My hands stung against the jagged bark, revealing that I'd probably cut them or had at least irritated the cuts and bruises I'd already received when escaping the shipwreck itself.

I gasped heavily for air, still trying to control myself. I leaned against the tree and closed my eyes for an instant, immediately regretting that choice. The face of the man I'd killed flashed vividly in the darkness behind my eyelids, a shocking punch to my battered awareness and an agonizing reminder of why I was running in the first place. I'd killed a man. _I'd killed him_. And then I'd left all of the remaining passengers of the late _Ocean Angel 5 _at the mercy of the mass-murdering psychopath also known as the Joker. A sob ripped from my chest as it all buzzed in my mind and wrapped around my heart and settled in my limbs and dragged me down to the cool sand below.

I collapsed against the tree, feeling its dry bark scrape against my clammy flesh. I curled my legs up to my chest and wrapped my arms around myself, a pile of broken glass trying to piece itself back together. I ached and stung all over, as if my physical and mental injuries were seeing how much they could hurt me just for the hell of it. I could almost hear their heckling calls and riotous bets, almost hear their fateful dice rolling, almost see the flashing lights and the glittering coins from Hell's Casino… I brushed my long, tangled hair out of my face again as it was pasted to my sweltering, salt-crushed skin. I'd never felt so horrible in my life. Nothing I'd done, no sin I'd committed compared to the regret, remorse, and utter self-loathing that I felt at that moment.

That time I'd lost my parents' checkbook didn't seem so bad now. The instance where I'd left my dog outside on accident and he'd been hit by a car wasn't as unbearable as it had been before. The memory of when I'd made my baby cousin cry because he'd innocently pulled my hair too hard wasn't as heavy on my mind. The friends I'd stabbed in the back, the people I'd let get the door for themselves or carry their own shopping bags, the grandparents I hadn't visited enough, the classmates I'd made fun of, the messes I'd made and failed to clean up, and every other recollection of my letdowns and disappointments now seemed to pale in comparison to the obliterated state I found myself in now.

I couldn't seem to square my shoulders and lift my head. It was as if the palm tree was curling down over me, pressing me into the sand, into the crumpled position that I deserved to be in for my transgressions. I didn't fight the weight, but instead let it crush me. And I cried. My tears wetted my arms and stung in my cuts.

Though I hadn't been a killer for more than twenty-four hours, it felt as if my family and friends and home had been gone for years. Everything that I'd known seemed so very far away. I tried to return to it in my mind, tried to pull my life of normalcy and pleasant ambition back into any sort of remote reality…

I missed my mom and my dad. They might've been worried by now – might've received the news that the boat had gone off track and communications had been lost. We'd traveled far after the Joker had taken control – or who knows how long he'd had the radio disabled as he steered us off course? There was a chance that someone knew where we'd been roughly before the boat sank, but it was a slim chance. For all I knew, perhaps no one even knew we'd been ship-wrecked. Perhaps no one even knew where we were, or where to find us. _I could never get home again._

The thought only made my tears flow with renewed sorrow and agony at the thought of what I'd lost being even closer to unobtainable. Perhaps my parents had no idea I, a lost and crying murderer, was here on a deserted island, slumped in the sand and longing for home. I guessed that mom would be arriving back from work soon. She was employed at various schools as a special-education teacher, and she got out around when the kids did. I sometimes got to see her in the halls, though I hadn't always waved. I now wished that I had more than ever. Granted, I hadn't left her on terrible terms, like right after a big fight that I'd never apologized for, but still… I wished I'd hugged her longer at the airport. I wished I'd never left her at all.

Dad wouldn't be home for quite a few hours, if I was remembering correctly. He worked at a power plant, supplying the city with energy by working hard with machinery and electricity. I'd always been proud to have a dad that put so much effort into his career to provide for Gotham as well as for his family. I sniffed, remembering his worm but welcoming face and wishing that I could reach out and hug him now, feel safe in his arms like I did when I caught him late at night just before I went to sleep, after a short talk about our days and murmured _I love you_'s.

My vision blurred with fresh new tears, my horrible reality becoming more and more unbearable as my thoughts continued. What had I done to deserve this? Did God just decide to screw up my entire freaking life today? I was a good person! Sure, I had my faults and my failures, but who didn't? I was only human, and now I couldn't even be sure of that.

I'd never felt so weak and helpless. I'd never felt so much like a scared, dumb animal, just waiting for my pursuer to track me down and finish its hungry work. I hated it. I hated the feelings inside of me and I hated the situations that had caused them to emerge into repulsive being. I hated all of it, and felt doing something hateful... No, that wasn't true. Not entirely… More pain and suffering wouldn't improve the situation. I hadn't even known my senseless bursts against the Joker had even been possible, but it seemed they'd deserted me now. I tried to be angry and vengeful, tried to motivate myself to move with new, furious strength once again, but it wasn't working. There wasn't much strength left within me.

I was so sorry. I was so regretful and remorseful for all that I'd done. I saw the blood on the beach, heard the cries of the crowd as the Joker searched for his next victim, watched myself allow people to die before growing a spine only to have it be smashed a few minutes later as I pulled the trigger. _Oh God, I'm so sorry… I'm sorry for everything…_ I drew further into myself and made a list in my frazzled mind of everything I'd done wrong that I could remember – the small and the large, the miniscule and the dire, matters of slightly inconveniencing life and of causing absolute death… I wanted to remind myself, to compare it all, and just have it all in my head in case I died here…or something…

My mind was switching topics and perceptions with every tear that slipped from my eyes. My emotions were in turmoil. The fringes of my broken pieces were glimmering as they reflected all different colors of light, creating rainbow displays beneath the swaying tree branches, chaotic and random as I ran around inside myself, stumbling blindly, reaching desperately, screaming with all I had left… I squeezed my eyes shut, trying so hard to just focus on the black – the darkness inside of me – and not think of the man I'd killed or the creature that had made me kill him…

I failed. I saw him, lying silent and still with the woman he loved. I saw the Joker. _I saw his smile, _the malicious grin of utmost, demonic approval that had been the final blow. It made me slam my fists into the sand with desperation, anger, pain, and sorrow. A drowning sob pulled free from my constricted chest, an air of hysteria bubbling out of me and making my foot twitch.

Oh, damn him! I shoved myself straight back against the tree, arching my body and making my head hurt as I jarred it against the rough bark. I winced, mentally scolding myself for my stupidity and recklessness. I remained upright, leaning back against the curling example of tropical fauna behind me, my face still tilted back, my body slackening slightly as I recovered from my moment of rigid rage… I felt the sunlight on my face, felt the small pools of golden light stream through the thick canopies above and dapple the cool ground all around me. It was almost…nice.

How could there be such peace in the world in the middle of all of this hell? How could the sun shine on me now, so softly, after it had almost made me burst into flames earlier? I squinted up at the sky, practically pissed that the air of the entire island seemed to have changed after it had destroyed me. What, was it happy now? Had it gotten what it had wanted? How could the trees shade me so kindly, the sand cool and almost comfortable beneath my aching form? How could all of this…compassion be here now? Where had it been when I'd needed it before?

I angrily blinked a couple of grains of salt out of my eyelashes. The skin of my face and neck kept burning subtly as the trails of my tears dried in the tropical breeze. Yes, they'd fallen, but they were drying now… The thought had strange worth to me, as if my frazzled consciousness were attempting to turn it into superglue for the specific purpose of collecting my scattered shards and sticking them back together.

What, was there something I could only do now that I was broken? Was there a point to all of this? Was this God's way of saying _I know it hurts, but I'm still here. Get up. Keep going.._? Was there something that I had to kill someone to see? I frowned. The back of my head began to sting, escalating with sickeningly-steady speed, and I realized that I'd cut my scalp against the rough tree bark when I'd slammed my head backward earlier. I winced and leaned forward, feeling blood begin to wet my hair. That movement also resulted in the many other slices and bruises all over my body screaming in agonizing protest. Tears welled from my eyes, the pain making my breath hitch in my raw, salty throat.

No, that was ridiculous. How the hell could killing someone at the prodding of a mass murderer be beneficial for anyone? There was no way that this was fated or whatever. There was no way that all of this torture could be better for me or for any of the people I'd left behind, in Gotham or on the beach or anywhere… I waited for my injuries to cease to flare like hell's fires, and then I slowly, cautiously leaned partially back against the tree, careful not to nudge my sliced head.

What would my parents say if they could see me now? …The thought seemed to sneak into my head without my permission, as if a part of me thought itself beyond repair and didn't even want to consider any motivation to attempt reconstruction. They hadn't raised me this way. Granted, they hadn't raised me to be a killer, but… did the fact that I was torn to shreds over this matter at all? I was their daughter. I'd been through things…nothing of this magnitude, but still… I was totally struck down – no sense in denying that at all – but was I really as destroyed as I'd thought previously? I'd fallen over an edge that I'd never expected myself to plummet over, and yet, was I utterly incapable of climbing back up, even a little bit? There were pieces of me left – a little bit of _me_ still remained…right?

I wiped my eyes on the back of my bloody sleeve, feeling the grains of sun-dried salt scrape against my receptive skin.

For a moment, I thought of nothing.

And then I thought of everything.

I wouldn't make it home by crawling away and crying.

Whether my parents were waiting for me or not, I wanted to do all in my power to get back to them.

I had no idea how to survive on a deserted island, but I wouldn't learn if I gave up now.

I didn't want to be a pathetic pawn in a sick and twisted game.

The game wasn't over yet. The Joker had seemed to know that I would fire that gun. I was still his pawn. He didn't seem surprised when I ran away. He probably expected that as well. But would he be expecting to see me again after that?

I had left all of those people alone. Maybe some had been inspired to stand up for themselves a little bit…although that might've crumbled when I'd killed someone…Even so, there was a chance that some of them were still alive and that, maybe, I could save them or die trying.

Yeah, I hadn't exactly proven my worth as a role-model, hero, or savior today, especially since I'd done the whole "I can do this – I can't do this – I can do this – I can't do this" thing way too many times already, but… I was at "I can't do this" right now. I supposed that it was worth trying to get to another "I can do this" before breaking again.

Would a shattered pile of glass think that way…? I wanted to say _no_ immediately, pick myself right back up all of a sudden and save the day, but I couldn't help it. I couldn't convince myself that I was still whole, strong enough to deal with any of this. Obviously, I wasn't dead yet, but part of me thought I might as well have been for how much of a difference I'd made today in the lives of the innocent…

I hadn't gotten up this morning and thought, _Hey, I'll get on the same boat as the Joker. I'll stand up to him and then be turned into his horrific example. I'll kill someone and run away like a totally pathetic coward. Yeah, that's what I'll do…_

I couldn't help it. My faith in myself was shaken. I'd never swayed so far back and forth between what I believed to be right and wrong. I'd never made so many unconscious and poorly-thought-out choices in one day before. _I'd never killed a man_.

_But there is a first for everything, right?_ I thought bitterly, sniffing the briny mucus further back into my nose so it didn't dribble onto my already-tainted clothing. Like it mattered…

No matter how the hell I looked at it, I had a choice to make right at this moment:

Stay here and rot, or go back and go out with a bang in some way, shape, or form.

I swallowed, weighing my options as I sat upon the sand, but then a sound reached me that was just the sudden catalyst I'd needed to drown all doubts (and rational thinking) out. It slapped me upside the head, in a manner of speaking, and also slapped me to my feet. I lurched forward, the loud crack of a gunshot echoing with rather painful familiarity within the pounding confines of my head. I pushed up off of the sand, staggering to my feet, and looking in the general direction that the sound had come from – to my right, and a ways away.

That proved I could hear it, which meant that it hadn't been fired until just now since I'd left unless I'd really been unresponsive in the sensory department a few minutes ago. So that meant that there'd been a reason to fire the gun. I'd left more than one person behind, so, unless they'd all strangled each other or something much quieter, that meant that there was a possibility that there was still someone left on the beach for me to save. I estimated around five victims left, if gunshot had been the only recent cause of death. I wasn't certain, but I was sure that I didn't want to sit here and cry any longer. I had a life to get back to, or at least a life to live for as long as I had left. And I possibly had a life to save.

That was enough motivation for me. I wouldn't let the Joker win this fight… at least, not willingly. I'd gotten back up after he'd turned me into a killer like himself. My life had been changed. Surely that counted for something in the cluster of my experiences to aid my survival and help me stand up to him? I knew killing was wrong, and I still believed it was even after I'd done it. My red flags of morality were a driving weapon that he would never have.

I had people to save, or I would die trying. A second gun-shot set me in motion. I launched myself into the forest, trying to see the roughly weaving path back to the beach that I'd created while traveling to the clearing I was now leaving behind. My feet pounded against the sandy earth, kicking up pale plumes of dirt behind me with each elongated step. My lungs burned, but I kept on running. My tear trails dried even further, fading into the background of my mind. All I cared about was reaching the beach in time.

My breath raked in and out of my weary lungs, but still I pushed myself. I owed the people on the beach that much – the best I had. I wasn't sure where such reasoning had come from. I didn't know any of them, and I hadn't made them any promises. I just felt like I'd been something to them, and then I'd failed them, and now was my chance to redeem myself, if only an infinitesimal amount. I knew that one life wasn't equal to another. I knew that, if I even managed to save anyone upon getting back to the beach and standing up to the Joker or something of the sort once again, that wouldn't change what I did… but… I had to try. I just had to try.

A third gun-shot cracked a ways to my left. I rerouted my path toward it, wincing and trying to run even faster. Unless I was totally misjudging the meaning of the gunshots, I was swiftly running out of victims to potentially save. I'd left five…no, seven…a dozen…whatever, a few people there when I'd ran. There should've still been some left, unless they'd used many instances of quieter killing methods… Oh, I wasn't sure, and it was so frustrating. _Less thinking, more running._ I was afraid I would over-analyze everything and waste focus on arriving to my previously-chosen destination… But what was I going to do, really? I didn't have a plan. I didn't have any special martial-arts training or superb fighting skills. I didn't even have the gun anymore.

That last thought was accented as yet another gunshot rang out. It was accompanied by a brief, gasping cry of agony, and the thick sound of a body hitting the sand. It was happening right in front of me. I could see the beach and the ocean through the sand. Almost there! I tried to settle it all in my head with thoughts like, _if I'm going to die here, then so be it, I guess._ If I was dead, then I couldn't take anyone else with me, especially if there was no one left to save due to my messing up my victim count when I'd fled earlier. Damn it, I didn't know and I didn't care. Perhaps it was wrong of me.

It wasn't that my life didn't matter to me anymore, or that I didn't care to return to the life I'd once had back with my family and friends in Gotham, but now, things were just so different and confusing… I didn't know what would happen to me or the Joker or anything. Perhaps it was stupid or selfish or vain or all three and a million more negative words, to just run blindly forward like this. I didn't know if I was trying to gain anything or just trying not to lose anything else. My mind was just drag-racing and making my feet obey its movement requirements. Every gunshot sound I heard was a kick in my rear, and I just felt like I had to go with it, no matter where it took me. _I had to try_…

The edge of the foliage was rapidly running forward to meet me. Another gunshot cracked, painfully loud with its proximity and bringing back hideous memories of when the one firing the gun had been _me_. I sucked in a breath, extended my arms, and then burst out into the open at the edge of the forest. The tree branches and leaves all whipped back into place upon my reckless exit of their cover, seeming to leave me with a final, scraping touch of farewell, as if they knew I'd never reenter their depths again. I stopped, lurching unsteadily on the sand, and stared with wide, terror-glazed eyes.

I processed what I could see in mere seconds, having had some practice with horrifying sights throughout the day. I immediately picked out the slouched, eccentrically-clothed form of the Joker, standing about five yards away from me. He was staring intently at a girl that was spattered with blood and breathing heavily. Two people were dead at her feet. She didn't have the gun clenched in her crimson-drenched fists, which made me guess that the Joker had it. The sand was littered and tainted with fallen bodies. The little boy, his mother, so many others… The girl was the only one left, from what I could see.

She had whipped her head up to look at me as soon as I'd emerged, her eyes a piercing, pale blue and burning with wild, animalistic energy. She stared at me as if I were something to eat, and it made my blood run cold. Her pale lips parted, her teeth gleaming in the sun. I froze, holding her gaze, trying not to make any sudden movements for fear of spurring her on and snapping her already-frazzled nerves. I knew upon looking at her that she'd killed the man and woman at her feet. She'd probably killed even more than that. And now here I was, alive and well and a few yards away, just for her…

"…_Niiccee_ of you to _join_ _us_ _ah-gain_, _**beautiful**_…You're _just in time_ for the _**finale**_…"

My eyes slowly panned to the left and settled upon the Joker, the sick, sadistic monster who had just spoken to me and who had also just recently led to the deaths of over twenty-people. A fearful feeling like ice water flowed down my back as I felt his black-hearted gaze draw me in to his manic, chaotic mind. His scars stretched into a hideous, blood-red smile at the sight of me, various emotions all mashed together into a twisted expression on his disfigured face. _Approval. Amusement. __**Pleasure**__. _My knees threatened to buckle. The sun was a spotlight again, the trees whispering goodbyes as I started to sweat and bleed and sting all over.

All of my resolves weakened. All of my reassurances fled. All of my willpower crumbled. In that running race against the gunshots, I'd been free to reject the thought of anything other than reaching the beach. Now, I was forced to think of how I had no idea what to do next, with two killers remaining far too close to me. I realized how I was pretty much powerless to save that girl, especially now, after she'd caved to the Joker's dark wishes. Did that mean I was beyond recovery and salvation as well? Perhaps it did. The Joker had the gun. The Joker had the blood-drunk pawn at his command. I was unarmed, not all that dangerous, and suddenly terrified to die all over again.

My mind was screaming at me to run. My brain tried to tell me to survive at all costs, to just get the hell out of there. My heart wouldn't listen – I couldn't find the will to flee anymore, to go against what I'd deemed to be the right thing to do only a few seconds ago now, after I'd just made my stand. My legs wouldn't listen, frozen stiff as if the sand were an ice-rink that had grown up to my thighs and solidified icily, holding me in place. I couldn't look away from the Joker. My mouth wouldn't form words. I had nothing to say. I just waited, for some miracle to allow me to make some amazingly decisive and helpful action or for the inevitable assault of the murderers before me (and within me) to finally take me down…where part of me thought I deserved to be.

I swallowed, blinked, and dropped my arms to my sides, letting my fists uncurl and hang flaccid. I tried to brace myself for any pain I could imagine, but I have a feeling it didn't really work. I probably looked pathetic and small and insignificant. I couldn't really force myself to care. No one else would ever see me so low again, especially since it would all probably be over soon, for me, at least… The Joker's black eyes rolled over to the girl beside him once again.

"…_Well_..?" he prodded her subtly, as if half-chastising a dog who hadn't immediately lurched to go retrieve a tossed stick. His unspoken command wasn't lost on her, or on me. His words were like a poison-coated dagger, letting him smoothly stab his evil directly into her unstable mind and light a mental fuse that burned up very quickly. Her eyes flashed, and she exploded into motion. She ran straight for me, her teeth bared, her bloody hands resembling claws as they reached with wild desperation for me.

Her footsteps sounded like thunder in my mind. Her eyes made me feel like a typhoon or a hurricane were snarling in my face, hurrying forth to devour me until there was nothing left, and I guessed that that simile wasn't too far off from her actual intentions. I felt tears well with heart-broken speed to my eyes, quickly spilling over and obscuring the sight of her, so close already, before me. I felt my whole body tense, but for some reason, I made myself hold firm and not run. Where the hell would I go, anyway..?

She hid the Joker behind her quickly advancing form, deprived me of the sight of the washing waves and the blood-stained white sand. But I still felt the sun, smiling down at me as if nothing was wrong…I held my breath, closed my eyes, and turned my head away.

_Goodbye mom and dad…Goodbye everyone…_

A loud, echoing crack made me gasp with surprise, my body tightening further with shock and fear. Something warm spattered my front, and I heard the all-too-familiar sound of a hunk of once-sentient meat dropping onto the sand. _…What..?_ My mind worked sluggishly, disorientated by the fact that I wasn't dead yet. There was no (new) pain and no light-headedness or anything… I hadn't been shot…

_**But someone had.**_

_Oh, God, no…_ A small sob hiccupped in my throat as I tried so hard to deny the truth that my mind was putting together based on the details that it was receiving. My tears fell freely as I turned my head with terribly-reluctant slowness and, after a monumental effort, opened my eyes and saw what I thought I would see: the girl was lying, still and silent, at my feet, the sand already becoming wet and red around her. She was dead. And the only one that was left to kill her was…

I looked up at the Joker just as he casually lowered the gun, still smoking in his hand.

_Why..?...__**WHY**__?_

I wanted to scream. My hands twitched into fists of wild, desperate emotion and I had nothing to hit. Why the hell had he killed her? I was the one that would have and should have died! I didn't have her killer's instinct – there was no way I could've competed with her ferocity and fearlessness. According to his _game_, she was obviously more willing and fit to win than I was!

So why was I still alive?

_**WHY**_?

My legs swayed, threatening to give out beneath me once again. I was so far beyond doubting that this all was indeed happening to me… It was too horrible to be made-up.

My parted lips trembled mindlessly as I stared with red, tearful eyes at the Joker as he sauntered slowly, with a lop-sided gait, toward me. He walked right over the fallen girl's body without a second thought, his black eyes never leaving my face. My breath hitched in my lungs at how close he was. But I didn't let myself speak and I didn't let myself collapse. I just couldn't… Not now. I had wanted to try, to try to do something, and now look where trying had gotten me…

He didn't touch me, but leaned closer so that his ruined, paint-smeared face was close enough to mine to make my entire body shiver with repulsion. I was forced to take one step back, just so that I didn't pass out or something. It made his scarred smile widen, just before he said a sentence that would haunt my nightmares for years to come.

"…And _now…_the _**real**_ _fun_ be_**gins**_…"

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**Yaay!~**

**I know it wasn't the most eventful chapter, but I thought some character development was in order. I'm pretty sure things will get much more interesting from here on out. ;)**

**Thanks again! Read and review! And I'll be back with chapter 6 ASAP. :D**

**~SD**


	6. Whiplash

**Hey guys! Sorry it's been so long. You know how life is. I'm on Christmas break now, so fanfiction might be moving a little faster than usual. Yeah, fingers crossed, right? ;)**

**Here's Tropical Torment, Chapter 6. **

**Some Death Note and Kuroshitsuji fanfiction on the way, hopefully. :D**

**Thanks for all of the reviews. They make me happy. I love you, readers.**

**Disclaimer: The Joker and the Dark Knight belong to Christopher Nolan and DC comics.**

**My OC and now-dead rabble of victims belong to me. **

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Tropical Torment

Chapter 6

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It all came down to this. After all I'd been through and after all I'd seen...and _done_... _this_ was the end of it. All I'd wanted was a worry-free trip on a cruise for spending precious time and effort on a stupid book, and I'd gotten the cruel severity of the world shoved right down my throat. I was choking on it now, suffocating, dying... and I had a feeling it wouldn't be a metaphor in just a few seconds.

I stared up at the Joker, the man who had, in one way or another, killed everyone on the _Ocean Angel 5_ except for me in less than three hours. I was the _only one left_... And I didn't deserve to be. Not only had I killed a man earlier, just because I was so pathetic and skittish and weak, but the girl who could've easily killed me was lying dead a few feet away from me. The Joker had killed her for some reason or another... I wasn't interested in knowing why. I was _so far beyond_ _**why**_. I just wanted it to end now.

Every time I'd come close to death this day, I'd shied away from it. I'd panicked. I'd been constricted by fear, and my body usually took over in one form or another to try and save me. My mouth had spasmed with words I thought he'd wanted to hear. My mind had ruptured with images and choices I thought he'd wanted me to consider. My hands had tightened around a gun. My feet had carried me toward him and away from him numerous times.

I had just kept crawling back after I'd run away... I'd just kept returning, trying to redeem myself at all or make some sort of difference in this flaming Hell, but now I saw the futility of it all. I was standing on the edge of my short life, and I couldn't feel any more...any more _anything_ about it...

I was at the end of my reserves. I was the last person left in his sick little game... I knew just as well as he no doubt did that I should've died a while ago... I didn't win his game. I hadn't fought bravely and wildly and unstoppably to defeat all of the other passengers of the ship. I hadn't intentionally taken a single life. I hadn't played by his rules. Why would he let me live?

I'd been shocked when he'd killed the girl who had been so close to ending my life, but now I kind of understood... Nothing mattered. None of us meant anything to him. Of course he would kill her. And of course he would kill me. There was nothing stopping him from killing me... Why would he resist? What was the point in letting me live?

I would probably die today... The thought was strangely not terrifying to me. It was like there wasn't any more fear left within me. It was like every emotion in me had reached its extreme and burned out. I was a charred, withered, blackened little wick, and it was time for me to get blown away. Oh well... I doubted I would've been able to readjust to a normal life after all I'd endured this day. The years of therapy would've been expensive for my parents... It was better this way... Sure...

My mind went blank. I was empty. I looked up at the Joker without a hint of emotion in my weary, stinging eyes. My lips were dry and parched, my skin warm and salt-crushed and burning... I basically consisted of pain – I was a being of pain, and I just wanted the pain to end. He seemed to know everything that I was feeling and thinking and being in an instant. The Joker stared down at me, still uncomfortably close to me, his black, sunken eyes boring into mine.

He was blocking out the sun for me, so all I could really see was him... He looked at me, at what I'd become, and he smiled again. His blood-red mouth stretched, his scars wrinkling and curling against themselves. His yellow teeth gleamed in the light, flashing briefly, like a hidden weapon being seen right before it was used. He then left my visual field. He walked away from me.

_He walked away from me._

He just waltzed around me, as if I were nothing more than an object in his way, some useless obstruction to his casual, enigmatic path. Every step of his shoes moving across the sand sounded like a landslide in my mind...

_Wait...__**what?**_

_What was he doing? What the HELL was this?_

_Was he NOT going to kill me? After all of this CRAP, he WASN'T going to KILL ME? _

_What use was I to him ALIVE? I HADN'T won his game! I hadn't done ANYTHING worth living for!_

I blinked, and life steadily began to return to me. My awareness flooded my mind once more, my body sparking with pain and heat and exhaustion. I was back, and _I didn't know why_. I'd been all ready to die. I'd sealed off my mind and body, left nothing but my soul for him to finally free, and he'd _WALKED AWAY?_

I mustered the will power to turn and gape at his receding form, my eyes wide, my lips trembling incoherently. The Joker was heading for the wall of foliage behind me, at the edge of the beach. His gait was still uneven, a kind of awkward, loping stride, as if _nothing had changed this entire time_... And then I realized that he'd done it. The _one thing_ that I hadn't been expecting. That seemed to be what he fancied most when around me... He'd been able to see just how ready I was to die, so what had he done? _Not_ killed me. He'd seen my emptiness and my capability to accept death, so he'd let me keep on living. I couldn't even think of a word vile and hateful enough to describe him right then.

I stood up in a violent, disorientating rush, on the ground in a pathetic heap one moment and a rigid tower of irrational fury the next. The sun seemed to lace my skin, heating my flesh, appraising my anger, fueling my rage. How dare he do this to me and everyone else! How dare he put us through everything, and then make me keep going! A tiny portion of my brain was still grateful to be alive, happy for life, but the vast majority of my being was snarling with indignation. I'd been ready to die. I'd been so ready...

I was basically pissed that I'd done all of that preparation only to have death walking casually away from me. I was pissed that I was still alive, as ridiculous as that was. Maybe I would be able to be grateful later. Maybe I would have the time to collect my wits later. Maybe there would be solace – and death – for me later. But all that existed within me at the moment was pain and fury.

My hands shook in tight, bloody fists, the salt all over my skin stinging in my wounds. My tangled, crusty hair hung raggedly in my face, sticking to my flesh, coating my neck and my bare back where my shirt had ripped and peeled away in places. My joints felt like they were on fire, searing origins of potential. My jaw ached from how severely I was gritting my teeth. My breathing began to escalate, keeping time with my racing heart. I was like a burning fuse, and I wasn't exactly sure how I would explode...but I got my answer soon enough.

My hatred for the man walking away from me drove me forward, toward him with frenzied, pounding steps. I wasn't aware of when I started running, but I was just moving all of a sudden. He got closer and closer, continuing to walk away from me until he must've heard my footsteps. He turned to face me, and I lunged with a savage scream. I slammed into him, roughly jostling both of us with the conflicts in our speeds and directions. We fell to the sand, hitting the ground with simultaneous sounds of pain, his a grunt and mine a gasp. Before I even knew what I was doing, my nails were raking across his face. I clawed the hell out of him just like I'd wanted to do all day. Fire roared through my veins, and each of my movements felt effortless, as if my hands were moving of their own accord and I was just trying to hold onto myself to prevent my arms from flying off.

It was like I was trying to control some great machine, or a fussy vacuum, one that was trying to run away from me, fighting my grasp all the while. My arms moved back and forth wildly, my fingernails biting deep. I felt the makeup coating his face on my fingertips, and soon, I felt warmth flowing along my hands. Something rippled in my flaming consciousness, and my arms finally fell back under my control. Gasping for breath, I stared down at the Joker's face, now crisscrossed with vibrant red lines, dozens of them, glistening and red as the bloody splash of paint along his ever-grinning face. I then looked down at my hands, and watched that all-too-familiar crimson fluid, the essence of life, drip down my fingers and pool in my palms. _His_ blood. I'd drawn blood, in my fury and in my rage, and now his blood was on my hands.

_His blood was on my hands._

The phrase had a strange weight to it, one that plunged so heavily into my heart that I gasped with surprise and sudden breathlessness.

I looked back down at him, searching and terrified, and he slowly but steadily smirked at me. His tongue trailed across his lips, licking up some of the blood that the scratches I'd created were still leaking. I trembled at the sight of it all, at the warmth and the wetness on my hands, and the rush coursing violently through me.

_Good God, what have I done?_

_He didn't provoke that – I mean, not directly... That was __**all me**__..._

_Look what I'd become... Oh God, help me..._

I couldn't take it. I couldn't take the way he was smiling at me. I just couldn't take it all. I whimpered, covering my face with my hands without thinking. I felt his blood against my skin, warm and wet and horrifying. It was all over me now, dripping and flowing and dying... My throat closed up, as did my eyes, but that didn't stop the tears or the sobs. I broke down, crumpling into my own trembling embrace, the blood mixing with the tears and all streaming down my face and arms in a disgusting cascade. I wished so hard for death, for the end of this beast I had become, for the end of it all...

But it seemed it wouldn't be mine just yet.

I felt something grip my wrists, and then my hands were ripped away from my face. The light flooded back in, and I opened my eyes with a gasp of shock to see the Joker's face only a few inches from mine yet again. He'd sat up so quickly, I hadn't had time to notice his movements until now. His hands wouldn't release mine, and when I panicked and struggled, he wrenched my hands down and buried them in the sand, forcing me to lean forward even more. I suddenly became aware of how I was straddling his waist, and just how close his blood-smeared mouth was. It felt like ice cubes were wedged in between the disks of my spine...and yet flames licked at the edges of my mind.

My eyes burned with my tears and his blood. I felt the sand sticking to my bloody fingers as well as I shifted them, searching for a solid surface for support in my attempts to escape. But there was nothing. Nothing but I and the devil that wouldn't let me go.

"_Mmm-hmm... I,_ uh, _knew _you hadit _in _you..." he slurred darkly, his voice like hot tar flowing across my skin. I winced, words abandoning me and leaving me to whimper in his restraining grasp. My breath was weak, my head swirling dizzyingly. His superiority was terrible, so suffocatingly present and possibly-true to my frazzled, desperate mind.

"_How does it __**feel**__, huh?_" the Joker continued, his black eyes seeming to burrow deep into my skull and spear my brain. His hands tightened around my wrists, making my fingers stiffen, letting me feel how his blood flowed against my skin and clumped in the sand all over again. I felt another bloody tear dribble pathetically down my chin and drip off of my sunken, weary, contorted face. He probably knew all too well what the adrenalin and warmth and fire were doing to me, seeing as I was far from his first victim.

"...But you're still-uh, _fighting it_... And, though I, uh, _don't __**ever**__ like to be __**wrong**_ as much as _the next guy_..._you may just_ make this _more fun_ than... I _ever_ expected, _beautiful_," he said to me, licking his lips again in a slow, savoring manner that made my flesh crawl. I closed my eyes and shuddered, listening to the sound of my blood pounding in my ears, hoping I would be lucky enough to experience a brain aneurism right at that opportune moment. I hoped for anything but him...

The silence stretched, and I kept my eyes closed until I felt something brush against my cheek. I started, my eyes snapping open just in time to see the Joker's bloody glove pulling away from my face. He'd wiped my tears away. I gaped at him, utterly unaware of how to take such a tender action when it was delivered by a monster like him. He merely stared back at me, his smile no wider than the normal stretch of his scars, his eyes indefinable pools of blackness.

Then my mind leaped to the fact that he had released my hands, and that now I was just sitting on him without being forced to. I blushed scarlet and choked on my ragged intake of breath and then threw myself off of him, wanting to be as far away from him as possible. I hit the sand and rolled, feeling the grains stick to the remaining fresh blood on my face and hands. He sat up easily, his green, sandy hair lolling in his face. His expression was still empty, bizarre.

"..._Why?_" I whispered simply, brokenly to him, feeling the warm tropical breeze brush against the trails of various fluids all over my face. My lips trembled with my barely-restrained sobs. I wanted to understand something about him. Anything at all. I just wanted to understand something, no matter how horrible or unbearable or brutally honest. Anything...

He looked at me, his mouth contorting as he probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue in an absent-minded manner. I waited, swallowing the lump in my throat and feeling the weight of the silence in which only the sounds of the sea washing on the shore and the sea birds calling on its swells could be heard. After all this, he wasn't going to answer? I wasn't sure I could bare that.

"_**Why?**_" I asked again, stronger and fiercer now, my extreme anxiety making my voice crack. The Joker swallowed audibly, and then got awkwardly to his feet. Sand rained down from the disappearing folds in his clothing. His face was still vibrantly bloody, the patches of white and black now streaked with bright red. He looked at me, his black eyes voids, though this time they drew me in, as if wishing to use me as material to fill the holes inside him. It made me blinked with surprise – I never would've thought of him lacking anything or wanting something more than death or chaos. I never would've thought such a profound thought could be his. And then I realized that I'd thought of him as capable of true emotion a little too soon.

"You're _asking_ for _a reason_...and, _huheh_, I'm _not exactly_ a _**master**_** of **_**reason**_, _now am I_?" he asked me playfully, his yellow teeth glimmering in a crooked, unsettling smile. His black eyes were glimmering again, crackling like malfunctioning fireworks of dark energy. Whatever I thought I'd seen...it wasn't there anymore. Perhaps it was never there. How could someone like him possibly feel anything like what I thought I'd seen? I doubted it was ever there...

He was crazy, psychotic, and I wasn't getting the understanding that I was searching for so easily. My hopes for an answer withered and died, my mouth lowering in a disappointed frown. I looked away from him, sitting up straighter on the sand and wiping my face with the back of my sleeve, trying to get as much of the blood out of my eyes as possible. As I sat there, the Joker turned and started heading into the woods. I glanced up at him curiously, wondering where the hell he thought he was going on a deserted island.

"Where are you going?" I asked suspiciously, voicing my frustrated thoughts aloud. He stopped, turned back to me, and fixed me with a disturbing look and a smile that matched. I winced slowly at the sight of him, and his smile widened even further, a repulsive giggle slipping from his bloody lips.

"To take_ a little _look around," he replied simply, shrugging and turning away from me, swinging his gun around his finger like in an old Western and heading once more for the woods. I blinked, realizing both that I'd guessed he hadn't searched the island before choosing it, hadn't planned a head all that much, and that I hadn't ever considered that he would be practical enough to evaluate his surroundings, even if it was a little late... like a human. He was a human. And maybe there was more reason in him than he gave himself credit for. Just maybe...

I had to hold on to that little hope – the one that said I didn't know this guy all the way through, that there was stuff about him that I totally didn't understand yet, and that there was a small chance that he would die of heat stroke or of starvation or dehydration like any other person. If I didn't hope that he was mortal and vulnerable just like me, then I was alone on an island with a psychotic, mass-murdering freak that was stronger, crazier, and more limitless than I would ever be, and then I didn't know how long I would last. I was on the verge of something terrifying and uncertain and unknown, and I could not have been more aware of it.

I was on a deserted island with the Joker, but I wasn't dead yet. I got up off of the sand, picked myself up after yet another of my many falls from grace, and headed into the foliage behind him, my eyes searching the foliage for any possible sources of food and water.

_Just maybe..._

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**Yaay!~**

**This one was kind of spur-of-the-moment, but I still enjoyed writing it.**

**I hope you all enjoyed reading it just as much.**

**Read, and review, and thanks! 3**


	7. Fall, Flinch, and Rise

**Hey guys! So sorry that it's been so long, but summer's giving me some free time and things should be moving a little faster now. Thank you all for the wonderful reviews. It makes my day every time. So here you go, the next chapter of Tropical Torment. Finally, right? **

**Disclaimer: I do not own Batman or the Joker or Gotham or anything. They belong to DC comics and Christopher Nolan. I do own my OC and – wait, the victim rabble's dead. Okay.**

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Tropical Torment

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Chapter 7

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The dead leaves, sticks, and various other debris of the forest crunched lightly under my feet as I walked. Part of my mind was tracing the patterns of the ever-shifting squares of light on the ground, the speckled dance of the sun streaming through the trees high above me... and the other part of my mind was in a sort of maddened, panicked daze. It was the kind of daze you go into after you've just witnessed a car crash, or gotten your leg blown off... or, in my case, witnessed the murder of hundreds of people and even accidentally partaken in it yourself.

I expected that it might take a very long time for the reality of all of this to finally settle into my brain with complete and utter coherency – even though I'd had reality slapping me across the face since the day began. A demented giggle made me look up. The Joker had tripped a little on a low, hooked branch and was gushing amusement as he stumbled and whirled before continuing on his way.

I felt my lips stiffen, my skin crawl, and my stomach twist all at the same time. Yes, he was still here... I was still on a deserted island with the Joker. _That_ element of reality was one that I could not escape, as much as I kept wishing that this all was just one big fat horrible nightmare... I was on an uninhabited spit of land in the middle of the ocean with no one but a mass-murdering psychopathic clown for company... I fought down the bile that rose in my throat whenever I thought about my current situation too deeply. I was still having trouble believing just how ridiculously awful I felt... I was sick to my stomach and sick to my soul, and I couldn't escape it.

I was an emotional ruin, and I just couldn't address it all at once or else I would explode... I had to stifle it, or it would overwhelm me beyond recovery. I had to take it slowly, try to process it one or two elements at a time. I rubbed my eyes, realizing that I was very tired – killing someone and running like Hell around seventeen times in one day could be considered exhausting.

I sighed, swallowing and tucking a stray lock of sandy, blood-crusted hair behind my ear. Would it always be this way? Would I always feel this disgusting and filthy and vile? My eyes prickled a little, but no tears flowed. It was almost as if I was out of them for the day. I supposed that could've been considered a good thing... I didn't like it when people saw me cry. _Especially_ freakish murderers like the one walking in front of me.

Even my own thought processes sounded strange to me as I reviewed them, but then I supposed that the situation may have brought out a different, unexplored side of me. This was all certainly unknown territory for me... I felt like I may have taken a few mental steps backward from the slight conviction that I'd found before on the beach, believing that there was hope as long as the Joker and I were both human, both mortal, both having a single thing in common ever at all. I might've just taken a few mental steps in a big circle, reaching no clearer conclusion or resolution within myself at all...

I tried to put my own mental state of being out of mind and think practically. I tried to think about the availability of supplies from the wreck of the boat, how my clothing could come in handy, what I would need... I began to review all of the movies and documentaries I'd seen about being marooned on islands and surviving in the wild. I was pretty sure I was clear in the area of talking to a volleyball... and yet it wasn't all that consoling to me, seeing as that in no way ensured that I would stay remotely sane before this was over. I wasn't sure if there even was an end in sight. I had no idea what to do.

Finally, addressing my lack of preparation and knowledge concerning the situation seemed to open a floodgate of questions that I had no answer for. I couldn't hold them all back anymore.

_How long would this last? _

_ Would the Joker kill me, ending it at any moment, or... would this go on for years? _

_ Would we be able to survive that long, or would we die of our own human limitations?_

_ Did he have any sort of plan or any preparations for this?_

_ ...Again, why the hell was I here and what did he want with me?_

_ Food? Water? Clothes? Sun protection? Anything at all?_

It really struck me then how I may have no more access to the outside world. If I didn't get off of this island, I might never see a city or a town or a computer or a car for the rest of my life. I might never see civilization again... I never realized how much I'd taken for granted concerning the facts that I had friends at school and a laptop to type my stories on and a warm bed with blankets at night and a family that loved me and a _life_. I knew I was still alive, but... So many things had been taken away from me all at once today... Something inside of me seemed to have died.

I twitched, finding a rejection of that manner of thinking as if I couldn't handle it in my current state. My mind kind of switched paths, as if it were trying to protect me without my conscious effort. I wasn't dead. I had to believe that. A part of me was gone, but I was not dead. Maybe a little less naïve... maybe a little less innocent... maybe a little less myself... but not dead. I couldn't take death right now. Which made my entire awareness of the Joker less than ten feet in front of me all the more repulsive.

He was just walking, as if he had not a thought in his head or a goal in his mind. I tried not to speculate too deeply about what he was thinking. His brain was definitely something I wasn't too keen about getting really in tune with... and I doubted that I would understand it anyway. I continued blankly on, letting myself get lost in the patterns of the sunlight streaming through the leaves high above, finding no death or insanity in that naturally beautiful dance... I didn't know what to do, now. And that wasn't how I liked to do things. I preferred sense and order – I carried a planner nearly everywhere with me during the day. I didn't always handle change well, and that led to me having another mental burst of "WHY ME?"

I sighed rather heavily, almost getting annoyed with myself. Despite the difficulty of the situation before me, I was certainly aware of how continuing to freak out about it and not taking any action would probably not help me at all. Was I just wasting energy with all of this panicking nonsense, or was it was actually helping me find a solid mental ground to stand on and prepare myself for what was to come? I still didn't really have answers for myself, and my frustration remained. And to make matters worse, the Joker heard me sigh. He stopped walking, and I would've ran into him if I hadn't noticed his shadow stop moving and leer creepishly in front of me.

"_Weary_ with the _world_-_uh_...are we?" he asked, looking at me with uncomfortably-attentive focus. I suddenly became aware of how horrible I looked all over again, with the sand encrusting my body, the dried blood everywhere, the tears and tatters in my clothing, the cuts and gashes all over me, and the dazed yet tremulous look in my tired, stinging, aching eyes... all because of him... I also saw how his face was still criss-crossed with the dried scabs that I'd left after I'd clawed the hell out of him... At the presently-addressed sight of him, the daze that enveloped my mind began to tremble and shiver and split at the seams. I was losing it all over again, just looking at him.

"...It's not like _you're_ easing my mind at all – I might be _a little less weary_ if I _**wasn't**_ stuck on a deserted island with _you_, without any food or water or supplies or _anything!_" I yelled back at him, only partially aware of how unnecessarily loud my voice was, indicating how I was probably beginning to lose touch with social acceptability in some situations... If most people were spoken to in the manner that I'd just spoken to the Joker, they most likely would've been rather put out by my tone and possibly expressed some signs of dislike toward being yelled at and an apprehension toward talking to me any longer when I was in such a currently inhospitable mood. But, unfortunately, I realized yet again that I wasn't talking to a normal person by any means.

"...Well, you don't _have_ to be here now, do you?" he murmured in an almost hissing whisper, his giggling, care-free mood vanishing in an instant. The ramifications of his words twisted dangerously in my mind, and the anger drained from my face. He continued to speak, very unexpectedly engaged by what I had yelled at him. He was giving it the thought that I was too afraid to give, and he wasn't holding back...He came closer to me, his footsteps disturbing the sunlit patches along the sand, his gaze darkening frighteningly before me.

"_**Not only**_ could you be _dead_ by now, but you could've been _somewhere else_ on this island, uh, _many times_... _**and yet you just kept coming back**_... _Huhh, beautiful? _Now_, why – is – that?_"

His words twisted like a knife in my brain, making my bottom lip tremble. He was right, so right that he didn't need to explicitly cite examples of my short-comings this day... I'd come back so many times, trying to be valiant, trying to be brave and make a difference, and probably not succeeding in any way, seeing as I was the only person that had survived the wreck of the _Ocean Angel 5_. He hadn't killed me – and there was a big, fat, bloated, disgusting, terrifying _**YET**_ at the end of that sentence... What if he killed me right now? How would I feel about everything then? This was too much. My life was held up so high on such a fragile, strained little strand right now. The precariousness of my life was overwhelming, and there was almost nothing I could do about it.

"... Oh, is your _confidence_, uh, _**failing**_ you now..?" he asked with chillingly accurate curiosity, the blackened smudges on his face bulging as he widened his eyes in mock surprise, "_Running out of steam_ in the _**blame game**_ – _especially_ after _you're the only one left_, and _you_ may have given _me_ a few new _scars, uh, in the process?_" My nerves ached with the strain of facing the truth. He knew it, and he smiled at me then, the movement making his face wrinkle and stretch. It pulled some of the scabs free, and I watched in horror as fresh blood began to well up onto the surface, a few thin streams dribbling hauntingly down his face. He knew how much I didn't want to be anything like him, and I could see the ghastly, oily black amusement in his eyes.

I was left speechless, wallowing emptily in my own failures and weaknesses and fears once again. He could see every scar I had, whether it was visibly marring the outside of my body or located somewhere deep within. I felt so naked and vulnerable all of a sudden, and I hated how quickly he could destroy the walls within me that I had erected in a pathetic attempt to protect and preserve myself. If things kept going at this rate, I didn't think I could take much more... Something flashed in his eyes, as if he knew just how on the edge I was. He then proceeded to lunge forward and reach for me all at once, a burst of startlingly unexpected speed that brought his bloody face and glistening mouth far too close to me.

A scream died in my throat, and my heart threatened to explode. I lurched against him, feeling his gloved hands claw at my shoulder blades as I twisted and attempted to escape. I felt something warm and wet scratch across my cheek, and choked when I realized how close he'd come to me with his bloody scars. I dropped to the floor and kicked at his legs, making him falter just enough to allow myself the time to bolt to my feet and run like hell into the surrounding woods, gasping and wheezing with fear and repulsion as I went. The leaves whipped across my face, stinging my wounds and smearing the blood on my face, but I merely moved faster. I heard him laugh wildly as I fled.

I stumbled quickly and unevenly away from him, my heart rate slowing more and more as I increased the distance between us. Thank God... I had to get the hell away from him, and felt instantly better when I had. He'd come far too close to me, and I'd escaped with a smear of make-up and blood upon my face... Ugh. I wiped it disgustedly upon my sleeve, grimacing at the reddish, grotesque smear. Unfortunately, all of this emotion and action had made it almost impossible to return to my little dazed, sun-dappled state that I had been in earlier... I'd survived yet another confrontation with the Joker and his manic, boundless unpredictability, mainly by running away from it all, and I wasn't sure how many more I could take. I hated handling anything by running away, and I'd done that so many times today...

Getting away from him and once again fleeing from my emotions seemed to result in my brain being more able to think clearly. I returned to rationality and self-preservation, alone, on this island, somehow... I was so tired, but certainly not too tired to keep walking in a direction that was opposite of the way that the Joker was traveling. No. I wasn't sure if it was possible to be too tired for _that_. My head was pounding, reminding me unnecessarily that my mental and physical reserves were running low for the day. I had to get somewhere safe... That was my objective. I figured that was the most important. I had to rest my body before I could fix anything... If I found food and water on the way, then great, but if I didn't, I would start looking in the morning. Hopefully I wouldn't regret that decision. I'd gone to bed without a lot of food in my stomach before, and it was quite a light-headed emptiness that greeted me in the morning.

I realized that things would most likely get much more grueling than that, seeing as I wasn't at home with constantly available food and water and shelter from the sun and the rain now... I sighed, hating the sound of my own situation in my head. Questions about my capabilities and competence were beginning to roar through my brain, and I was getting overwhelmed with the journey before me. I was not built for such a drastic change in lifestyle... but I supposed that I was still alive and that, by that fact, I was granted the potential to try... Yeah, I'll hang on to that, right? With a bitter smile, I assumed I would see how lively and ambitious I felt after night fell when I was stumbling around in the dark being stalked by jaguars...

I side-stepped a low-hanging branch and was careful not to trip over some randomly splayed tree roots, finding some tiny sense of accomplishment that I hadn't fallen on my face. There was some strange nostalgia within me, seeing as I remembered vacationing with my family a few years back in the Florida Keys, where the sand was soft and the sky so blue, just like it was now... and also walking through the woods around my house as a child, where I'd tried so hard to be stealthy, toning my balance and movement in such a seemingly wild area... I'd come so very far, and yet I still wasn't ready for this at all... The world still seemed like a vastly different place to me, now, and I wasn't sure I would ever see it the same way again.

I walked for what felt like hours, and moved through a seemingly endless maze of woodlands and palm trees and sand. Clouds swayed and billowed slowly overhead, contrasting with sharp laziness in comparison to my frenzied, freaked out state of mind. The sky was always changing, but the forest kept looking the same. The place was a lot bigger than it had seemed from the boat... Occasionally I found the shoreline, and walked along that for a while before I usually re-entered the forest to escape the sunlight. I felt like my sunscreen had melted off long ago, and wasn't keen on getting roasted on my first day as a castaway.

Eventually, I came to a stretch of sand that jutted out into the sea, kind of a natural pier that was slightly elevated above the waves for a short while before ending in a short, rocky, rugged little cliff. It dropped off into a slightly deeper part of the shore, ruining the smooth transition from sand to steadily deepening water that the majority of the rest of the coastline seemed to follow. I walked to the edge of it, peering down into the deep blue surface below. There were a few larger white specks that I expected were shells and a few darting streams that were tiny fish, no use to me and my hungry stomach with my lack of fishing materials...

Unsatisfied in every way, I stood up and turned, looking back toward the mainland – and my eyes widened. Spearing up from the trees to the north was a rocky mountain range, a general rise in the elevation of the land that ended in a high peak. It was relatively small as mountains went, but I was still rather surprised that I hadn't noticed it sooner. Well... I'd seen it from the boat, of course, but it just hadn't struck me as useful until now. Mountains could mean shelter from the elements – a cave would be positively brilliant. I wasn't afraid of the dark at least... Now it was just a manner of getting up there.

Oh well. It was kind of my only option at the moment, unless I wanted to make some weird tent thing out of leaves and sticks in the forest, and that didn't sound very stable to me. I headed inland again, staring up at my potential home and noticing as the barest hint of orange from the coming sunset began to paint the jagged rock face. I was running out of time now. God only knew what came out at night on this island. I knew some of the most dangerous creatures in the world were nocturnal, and my heart began to pulse faster. A sense of urgency overcame me, though of course it wasn't like the whole freaking day had been more urgent and fast-paced and dangerous than I could handle, normally. I swallowed another world-weary sigh and quickened my footsteps.

It wasn't long before I came to the base of the rock formation, finding that it was a little bigger than it had looked along the coast. It was very daunting already, but it was rather refreshing to have such a simple task in front of me. I could take this one thing at a time, now. I could almost make myself forget that the only other person on the island with me was the Joker himself. I could almost forget that civilization might be nothing but a faintly remembered dream to me now... I could almost forget it all. Right now it was just me and the gigantic rock that I had to climb, possibly in order to survive. I could wrap my head around that easily, and I started my ascent.

The footholds and handholds weren't too sparse at the start. It was more of just jumping to and from and lifting myself onto different large rocks, but it got quite steep after a while. The sections that I used to land on got smaller, forcing me to stop after a while. Thankfully, there was a jutting platform that I was able to rest on and catch my breath. I wasn't used to this kind of strenuous activity, and my muscles began to tremble and ache, making climbing any further even scarier than before.

I'd always enjoyed rock walls as a kid, at fairs and festivals and fishing shows, and I knew how useful my straining body got after a while, and how I would fall slowly to the floor with my harness to try again after catching my breath. But I didn't have a harness this time. Falling would certainly mean death, now. I didn't know what to do. I was above the trees now, and didn't fancy climbing back down in my current state any more than I fancied climbing higher... Crap... The sun was still going down. I was bathed in fiery orange light that seemed to be quickly fading.

My aching muscles would have to just suck it up – I couldn't just sit here all night. There was a good chance that I would roll over sleepily to my death, and that was just something I could not be okay with for all eternity, especially after all I'd been through today... I had to keep going. _Just get somewhere safe – then you can collapse due to exhaustion._ But God, it was easier said than done... My fingers were screaming as I grasped for ledges to haul my moaning body up even higher with my groaning legs. As I got further up the side of the rock face and began to feel my weakness all over again, I rather wished I'd stayed on the ledge and risked death in my sleep, instead of death mid-climb. The sweat moistening my brow was beginning to be coolly kissed by the approaching night.

If I survived this, I was going to be immensely proud of myself, I decided. I hadn't felt good about much of anything all day, and if this didn't kill me, _damn it_, I was going to feel _good_ about it. Just having a good feeling to look forward to seemed to help a little bit, but only a little bit... This wasn't looking good. I reached up again with a monumental effort, wincing as I hauled my body up the rest of the way as well, feeling my strength withering away with finality. I wasn't somewhere safe... not now...

And then I climbed up over the edge of the handhold and was surprisingly able to roll for a few feet before contacting another wall. I blinked with surprise, looking around and realizing that the flat surface I was on curled further up the mountain and further down, almost like a trail. _Are you kidding me?_ There was some semblance of a _PATH _to get up this thing? And I'd basically scaled the side of it for _NOTHING?_ I groaned on the floor and rolled against the wall, pounding it with my fist and hissing in pain as my strained fingers burst into flaming agony. Stupid stupid _stupid_... and yet a bit of a story of my life, at this point...

I sighed heavily, and just lay there for a few minutes, feeling my body pulse and sting all over with the remnants of my semi-wasted efforts... Oh well... Maybe the pathway wouldn't last forever, though I hoped it did even if I felt ridiculous right now, just because it would make things easier later... If there even was a later. It was getting dark now, the sky and stones and just general surroundings looking grey and shadowed and rather frightening with their ferocity and the feral mysteries they hid from me... I was so out of my element here, it hurt, both literally and figuratively. I sat up slowly, so as to not get a head rush and risk tumbling to my death over the edge of a cliff, and then stood upright, bracing myself against the rock face beside me.

I wandered down the pathway, heading toward the lower elevation, testing the ledge with my feet. It seemed quite stable. I rounded the bend in the rock, and realized that the trail went roughly half way down the mountain side, so I would've had to climb something one way or another – it just could've been a hell of a lot easier... Not wanting to dwell on that fact too much, I then turned and headed back up the trail, crossing the ledge that I'd climbed up on in the first place and continuing past it. It looked more jagged and cavernous higher up, which made me believe the thing that I wanted was more likely to be closer to the clouds instead of closer to the ground. And sure enough, I was right.

As I climbed, I began to see holes and crevices in the rocks. They weren't exactly what I was thinking of, but a few of them were deep enough to work if I really couldn't find anything else tonight... I wanted to make sure they were a last resort, though, and continued on past them up the mountainside a little further. A dark shadow caught my eye, and I nearly squealed with delight when I saw that it was the opening to a cave, easily taller than me. Then I reigned in my initial joy and thought rationally. There could be something else inhabiting it. I doubted that there were bears or wolves or anything on a tropical island like this one, but I didn't want to take a chance and risk getting mauled by a wild animal after I'd climbed so high and gotten so far.

I cautiously approached the entrance, keeping close to the edge of the rock face and staying out of the line of sight of anything inside the cave until I got to the very edge. Carefully and quietly, I curled my face around the edge and peered inside. It was quite dark, but I could partially make out some shapes in the shadows. It was easily big enough for me to live in, much bigger than any of the crevices and craters I'd passed coming here. There was some lump-ish thing against one of the walls, maybe where part of the wall had collapsed in a little rock-slide. Some cubic things were in the back, oddly perfect to be created by natural means...

I stooped and picked up a pebble near my feet, tossing it into the mouth of the cave and hearing it click and clatter as it fell. The sound reverberated clearly out to me, and I waited for a minute, seeing if I disturbed anything that may be dwelling within the cave... There was nothing. No response. I debated for a while with myself about entering it or not... It seemed clear. Was I willing to make that gamble, that any beastie inside of it wasn't just a heavy sleeper that I had to trip over in the dark before it woke up? ... I then decided that I was tired, and that I was going to go to sleep here if it was the last thing that I did, hungry wildlife be damned.

... It was rather sickeningly funny that I chose to think in that way, about sleeping here even if it killed me, in response to what happened next. I entered the cave, slowly and carefully in the dark just to make sure I didn't trip and fall on my face. As my eyes began to adjust to the blackness, the lump-ish thing and the cubes began to take on strange shape and form... The lump seemed to be a pile of small, fluffy looking things, ovals and squares of different shapes and colors..._Pillows?_ And the cubes were certainly wooden crates, human made boxes without a doubt. ... _What on earth..?_ I took a step back, and ran into something that hadn't been there before. My blood ran cold when I heard an all too familiar voice.

_"Welcome home, beautiful..."_

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OoO

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**Okay, there you go! Please read and review and lemme know what you think. The next chapter's already underway. Thank you again!**


	8. A Night to Remember Or Never Forget

**Hey everybody! It's good to be back and updating again...**

**Sorry this took so long. It's a little short, too, but oh well. I hope it's better than nothing. **

**Here's chapter 8. Please read and review and let me know what you all think. Thanks for all of those people who have commented positively and constructively on this story so far. I really appreciate it.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own The Dark Knight or the Joker. They belong to Christopher Nolan and DC Comics. Random OC is me = mine. :)**

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Tropical Torment

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Chapter 8

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For a moment, I couldn't even move. My body was frozen in shock, my brain unable to comprehend what was currently happening. I stared wide-eyed into the dark, seeing the distortion in my shadow cast upon the wall before me, indicating that there was something tall and bulky behind me. I swallowed, bracing myself for what I knew I would find, and turned around, coming face to face with the Joker once again.

His scars stretched widely at the sight of me, and the darkness almost made me wonder if dark red blood was gushing from between his yellow teeth for just a moment. I shivered, at the mercy of the shadows and my imagination and the murderer before me.

"_How_...H-How did...?" I tried to ask, tried to understand, but my lips wouldn't move the way that I wanted them to and the words wouldn't come to my positively burned-out mind... The Joker giggled repulsively in response to my confusion, his nasty teeth glinting in the dark.

"...Surely you noticed the, uh, trail on the way up here...? Oh, well, I guess not..." he said, mocking me once again, until he reached out to brush his gloved, make-up-smeared fingertips across the sweet dappling my brow, evidence of my unnecessary effort of scaling the massive rock face instead of just walking up the stupid thing. I lurched backward, partially-tripping over one the random pillows that was lying a ways away from the rest of the pile that I had noticed earlier.

That's right...

I looked around again, seeing things clearly now that my eyes had adequately adjusted to the darkness. The pile of pillows looked comfortable, to say in the very least, after all I had been through today... They had some dirt and dust on them, but I didn't care. They were circles and squares and rectangles of various colors and sizes, grouped into an indentation in the hard rocky wall, and they were wonderful.

Further behind me, the random squares took shape. They were crates, longer than me – I could probably fit in them... It was a weird observation. I had not a clue what was in them, but they almost looked like the kinds of things that fell out of cargo planes, so maybe food or medicine or weapons... There was only one logical explanation for this stuff being here – someone had brought it here. I turned back to the Joker, meeting his gaze once more and feeling chills ripple up the backs of my legs...

He had planned for a survivor to his little game.

_He __had __planned __for __**me **_.

My blood ran a few degrees colder.

There was a moment of silence between us. I gaped at him and he stared back at me, amused at my expression, taking glee in my disorientation and fear, loving every minute of this ridiculous hell...

The horrid reality of the moment was too much for me. I tried to focus on something else, even if it was just for a second... I turned to the setting, outside of him and me.

The moonlight was the only light in the cavern, filtering in majestically, casting everything in pale shades of white radiance and black shadow. It also illuminated the beautiful island outside, making it a perfect piece of art, a montage of complementary shades and hues, one that I only just now had the time to notice after I wasn't hanging onto a cliff face for dear life... And... Reality was coming back...

It would have been so much more beautiful if I wasn't in a cave with the Joker at the moment.

It seemed likely that I was staying there, too, if my previous theories were correct. I didn't know the island. I didn't know the creatures of the island. I didn't know how to climb back down the cliff at all or follow the trail in the dark. On its own, staying in this cave tonight was the safest option – there was just one problem, and _he_ wouldn't stop smiling a blood-red, ragged smile at me.

"...So...What now?" I managed to ask him, though I knew I didn't really expect a satisfactory answer. I felt surprisingly calm, conversational, collected all of a sudden... I doubted it would last.

"...Well, I **think** it's, uh, _**time **__**for **__**bed **_, _beautiful_..." He said to me in response, making my flesh crawl with how he said "_bed_"... Anything concerning him and a bed in the same sentence was unbelievable. There were all kinds of things wrong with what he'd just said and how he'd said it... I turned away from him, glancing once more at the pile of pillows that I assumed would suffice as the place that I would sleep tonight... And for how many nights after..?

I approached the pile and grabbed a random blue, square pillow and headed off toward the mouth of the cave, intending to just sleep along on the hard floor by myself as far away from him as possible.

"_Hold __on __there _, beautiful... I want them _**all **__**together **_... Doesn't it just feel – _**closer**__,__ to__ you?_"

The Joker's words made me pause. I hadn't expected him to care at all about such an obsessive-compulsive thing like having all of the pillows in one place. Maybe he was just messing with me. I turned around, my mouth set into a firm line. I refused to comment, and threw the blue pillow back into the pile of its fellows. Then I sat down upon the cold stone where I was, situating myself and glancing out at the tropical night before me, outside the mouth of the cave. I would sleep without a pillow if he wanted to be picky like that. Whatever.

"Now, beautiful... you're gonna, uh, _get __**quite **__**cold **__over __there _..." I heard him murmur just to me, his voice creeping up on me in the dark...

_What __the __hell __was __he __getting __at? _

I was starting to get annoyed, in a surprisingly normal, average, human way. I was tired and I wanted to go to sleep. That was all I was thinking about right now. Not that my family and friends were gone, my life was in danger, and I was alone on a deserted island with the Joker – I was just really freaking tired right now, and he was the one opposing that. I turned on him.

"_Then __where __do __**you **__want __me __to __go? _" I snapped, grumbling like the sleep-deprived youth I was as I sat up and looked toward him. He smiled at me, giggling playfully in a way that made me feel uneasy in many ways. I was already regretting the wording of my question... The Joker then turned away from me, waltzed forward, pivoted on his ragged purple shoes, and then dropped back like a rock into the pile of pillows, bouncing slightly in their cushiony embrace. He sighed with exhaustion, situated himself...and then patted the space beside him. He wanted me to sleep with – sleep _next __to _ him... I was speechless.

"_Right __here _... We'll _share_, beautiful," he informed me, much to my absolute horror. All of the blood immediately drained from my face. I gaped at him, unable to respond in any way whatsoever. I was expected to share a bed with a sadistic, mentally-unstable, mass-murdering clown? My expression must have amused him, for another psychotic giggle slipped from his lips, lips that he licked so that they gleamed like blood in the moonlight...

"Don't be nervous, beautiful," he assured me, his voice haunting and electric in the dark, "I just wanna _**make **__**sure **_ you don't, uh, _**run **__**off **_ or do something, _dra-stic_... After all, _how__ – __would__ – __**I **_ get to have _**any **__**fun **_ that way?" he grinned, his teeth a dull flash in the moonlight. He looked like a smirking demon, sitting there, waiting for me... I trembled, the word _fun_ bringing many ghastly images to mind. My eyes prickled with frightened tears, but I fought furiously not to let him see me cry. That would be vulnerable and I hated to be vulnerable.

My feet felt spot-welded to the cavern floor. My mouth was getting dry from hanging open for an extended period of time. My heart pounded in my ears. When I made no inclination to do as he had instructed, his expression suddenly became frighteningly serious. His dark eyes bored relentlessly into mine, stabbing like daggers into my soul and washing a cold chill throughout each of my limbs. He was daring me to refuse his orders. My eyes didn't miss the glimmer of the knife at his belt. I clenched my hands into fists, trying to gain what self-control I could.

I couldn't forget that he was Gotham's greatest criminal mastermind. Here I was, refusing to take five more steps and lay down. Shivers crawled up my spine at the thought. He was no doubt one of the most dangerous men alive. He killed. He cold-bloodedly murdered. He burned. He destroyed. He was lethal. He could kill me at anytime in any place at his leisure. I was at his mercy. And I knew he wasn't one for being merciful...

I was terrified.

I'd admit that to anyone.

I can recall no time in my life where I had been that terrified before.

The Joker waited for my next movement. His tongue trailed slowly across his ragged crimson lips, making me shiver again. His eyes never left my face, causing my skin to crawl uneasily beneath his probing gaze.

"You're considering _**running **__**away **__…__to __**where **__?_ It's **not ****like **_**you **__**really **_ have _that __many _, uh, _**options**_ _here_, beautiful," he smiled, the movement strange and twisted with his ghastly scars. He shifted into a more comfortable position, settling back into the pillows with his purple gloved hands behind his head, making his ragged green hair pool disgustingly.

"I'm _**tired**_...**Don****'****t** make me _**chase**_ _you__tonight_," he commanded, his voice stern enough to be threatening while still holding an air of genuine fatigue... Gazing at the pillows, I realized yet again, on a very human level, that I was very tired as well. Still, I was sure _he_ wasn't _too __tired _ to _kill__ me_, should he decide to, and I wasn't _too __tired _ to _die.._.

I addressed my fear. Fear was normal. Fear was always present. Accepting it gave strength.

I felt a sudden urge to fight my fears.

If I ran, he won. He seemed to expect me to run. Causing fear and chaos and panic was what he loved to do. He enjoyed watching people fear him. Of course, I was terrified, but I didn't have to die a coward. I didn't have to give into my fear. I didn't have to give him any more enjoyment than I was experiencing.

So, fighting my every instinct screaming for me to run from the cavern, to flee for my life, to not get a _centimeter_ closer to the infamous Clown Prince of Crime, I walked with stiff, unwilling, but determined movements over to the pile of pillows and sat down beside a man who could have killed me without a doubt. Fear sparked throughout my brain and settled icily in my stomach with our much-too-close proximity. Part of me could not believe I had just sat beside him.

_What __was __I __thinking? _ My nerves burned with feelings of panic and alarm.

His dark eyes glided heavily across my face, catching every uncomfortable twitch and unintentional movement contorting my otherwise blank expression. He seemed interested that I had come over to sleep beside him instead of barreling headlong into the wild recesses of the surrounding rainforest, getting as far away from him as possible.

I knew already that I would most likely be awake all through the night. I could hardly relax enough to _sleep_. I could have not lived to see another _sunrise_...

I trembled slightly, the reality of my ghastly situation hitting home once again. All that I had worked for, earned, gathered, and ensured for a wonderful future could have now been completely worthless. Tears prickled at my eyes again, but I quickly blinked them away.

Suddenly, without warning, the Joker's arm wrapped around my front and dragged me down onto my back beside him among the pillows. Screaming with surprise and fear, I struggled, managing to land a forceful but uneven punch into his face. Laughing it off loudly, he pulled a thin, wicked knife from his pocket, spun it in the air, and stuck it into my mouth, stretching my cheek against the blade.

Silence immediately descended.

My heart threatened to explode.

I gazed at him with wide eyes, hoping that I didn't appear pleading, weak, or pathetic. I managed not to whimper. Points for me.

"_Hmm_… no wonder you survived, beautiful. There's a _little_ fight in you," he murmured darkly into my ear, making my eyes squeeze tightly shut in fear. He was wrong... He was so wrong... I only won because he let me win. I wasn't strong... He was wrong...

He slowly pulled the blade from my mouth, causing me to release a quivering gasp when it was gone. Trembling upon the pillows, I tasted metal and blood that no doubt belonged to other people. The thought made me shudder violently as bile rose into my throat. Ignoring my obvious discomfort, the Joker wrapped his other arm around me and pulled me close, stealing away almost all hope of escaping his clutches. My flesh crawled murderously once more as I felt his chest against my back.

_No. __**God **__no. __This __wasn__'__t__ happening...__Why __was __this __happening? _

"_What __are __you _– " I started to yell, unable to keep quiet in this situation.

"_**Sleep **__**well **__,__beautiful _," he whispered to me, laughing slightly and causing his warm breath to breeze across my ear. Hot tears prickled at the corners of my eyes and slowly dribbled down my face. It didn't take long for him to notice my blasted vulnerability. I tensed perceptibly as the Joker brushed his rough, make-up coated fingers across my face to wipe my tears away, smacking his lips at my ear.

"_**Don**__**'**__**t**__** – **__** cry**_, _beautiful_... You'll _**ruin **__your __**make-up **_," he mockingly informed me, a chillingly tantalizing smile in his voice.

"..._I __**don**__**'**__**t **__**wear **__make-up _," I told him, my tone strong with the truth, though my voice still quavered with sickening revulsion and fear. I didn't like to wear it. I never had. I felt like my face wasn't mine.

"..._**You **__**will **__when __**I**__**'**__**m **__through __with __you _," he murmured darkly to me, making me shiver once more in the inescapable enclose of his arms.

_ Oh,__God, __no... __Please, __no... _ I couldn't fight back the tears now. They flowed freely down my face, burning trails down my cheeks, splattering messily upon my pillow.

The Joker never stopped holding me as I cried myself to sleep.

The sound of his wicked laughter was the last sound I processed before darkness draped over my world...

I prayed that I would wake up from this horrid nightmare once and for all.

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**So yeah, there you go! Thanks again, and please read and review!**

**SD**


	9. Good Morning, Sunshine!

**Hey guys! Sorry this took so long! Finally decided that I needed to write just for fun and put all of my homework and college crap on hold for a bit. This sufficed like therapy. :)**

**Hope you like it! I wanted to type more, but I wanted to give you something. At least my creative juices are flowing again… Hopefully I'll be able to get another chapter up soon.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own The Dark Knight or the Joker. They belong to Christopher Nolan and DC Comics. Random OC is me = mine. **

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Tropical Torment

Chapter 9

I had never had such a restless night in my entire life. I was so exhausted after everything that had happened, so much swimming and running and climbing and fighting for my life… Part of me thought that even sleeping beside the Joker couldn't have been enough to deny me rest. I'd never been one to have trouble with sleep before. I loved sleep and I always had, lazing about for hours, barely awake, in the warm enclosure of fluffy blankets, slipping in and out of dreams. This night could not have been farther from the blissful, late-morning slumber I so desperately craved and missed with all my heart.

I did get some semblance of sleep, for the record. There were moments of welcome unconsciousness, but otherwise, I just wallowed in my own pain and discomfort. My cuts and bruises were still stinging. The cavern was cool and the air was damp in a way that made me miss my old pajamas. I kept shivering, but was still too terrified (and attempting to remain dignified) to snuggle up to the Joker.

Whenever I woke and found myself still in the cavern with a criminal, I had to swallow the hideousness that was my undeniably painful reality once again. I was reminded countless times that there was no warm bed, no mom to come in and check on me if I screamed due to nightmares, no water cooler just outside my door if my throat got a little dry, no nothing but an expanse of strange, savage jungle. I missed the gentle hum of my fan, though I could kind of hear the rhythmic washing of the ocean against the shore far below. I kept waiting for a jaguar to wander into its cave after a night on the prowl and give the Joker and me an unexpected surprise. I didn't feel safe in the slightest, but still I managed to sleep somewhat…

In one of my moments of anxious consciousness, I noticed a tiny element of normalcy. We were both just breathing, not talking at this presumably-late hour or killing each other or anything like that. I heard the Joker breathing pretty evenly, though he didn't snore or anything. I couldn't confirm if he ever slept, all throughout the night. I didn't dare turn around or ask, for fear of provoking him in any way. I considered trying to sneak away in the darkness, but I figured it was still just as futile as it was when I first lay down beside him – I didn't know the island any better or have any more of a plan than when night fell, so why try and run now?

The Joker didn't pester me any more than he already was by having his arm around me. He didn't burst out laughing suddenly and scare the hell out of me. It was almost unsettling for him to be so quiet, but I didn't complain – it certainly made sleep easier in the brief moments when it came to me.

I didn't know what time it was. I didn't know where exactly on the planet Earth I was. I just know that I was still alive, that I was on an island, and that morning seemed like it was on its way. I drifted off to sleep once more as the sky displayed the barest hints of lightening. I had a dream about a seething blue mass. I seemed to be trying to swim through it, exhausting my mental focus in an effort to make my rebellious limbs cooperate enough to save myself and stay afloat. The blue beat at me, pushing and shoving me in all these different directions until I sank, unable to carry on.

I woke with a start after feeling that stupid, horrifically-disorientating falling sensation.

When I sat up, my eyes wide open and stinging, my cuts and bruises also aching at the sudden exertion, I realized that nothing except gravity and my own weakness had hindered that movement. There wasn't an arm around me anymore. In fact, as I looked around the cavern, I couldn't see the Joker anywhere… I wasn't sure what to make of that.

Where could he have gone?

Had he…actually left me here? Had a helicopter come while I was asleep and carried him back to Gotham? Was he testing me somehow, continuing his sick little game and seeing how I would do on my own? I thought I would've heard a helicopter, but I'd always been a sound sleeper as a kid, immune to thunderstorms and snoring alike. Still, I would've never thought I'd end up on a deserted island with one of Gotham's most wanted, so I was open to all of the complications and possibilities.

I stretched, feeling my back crack rather harshly, and then stood up. I ached and stung all over, taking a second to brush all of the sand and salt from the evaporated sea water and crusted blood from my clothing. It formed a repulsive radius of unpleasant reminders around my feet. I also realized that I'd lost one of my shoes at some unknown point since the ship was wrecked on the reef.

I moved around the cave, giving myself some time to wake up. I wasn't a morning person even when the circumstances of my awakening were hundreds of times better than this. My brain hadn't truly begun to acknowledge the fact that the life I had known before was completely over. I moved as if I were still in some sort of daze. I approached the crates in the back corner, still curious as to what they contained. They were nailed tightly closed, and I didn't really have any tools to open them. It was also too early in the day for me to care too much. I turned, itching the back of my head, and walked to the mouth of the cave.

The lighting was rich and golden. I figured it wasn't exactly morning anymore, maybe between 10 and noon. It seemed I'd kind of managed to sleep in despite my unsettling circumstances. I walked further out of the cavern, standing at the edge of the path leading to the entrance, the sun immediately chasing away the lingering chill on my arms and legs from the damp night in the cave. A tropical paradise stretched out below me, as far as I could see. It was a mass of emerald trees and foliage, gently swaying in a warm, humid breeze. I could see where the green ended and the white began, the sand bleached by countless years under the hot, shimmering sun. Beyond the sand was the ocean, an undeniably gorgeous hue of blue. It reminded me of _Blue Raspberry Jolly Ranchers_. It always had…

My mother would've loved it here, minus all the terror and primal necessity for survival.

I really wished that this was the vacation I had set out initially to be on, but I knew that it wasn't. My injuries and lack of a shoe and loss of innocence were supportive to that. For the first time since officially awakening for my second day in this beautiful hell, I remembered the man I had killed. I remembered how it had looked when the life, the vitality – the light had left his eyes. I remembered all of the dead people from yesterday – the little boy, the doe-eyed woman, the crazy girl who should've taken me down with them… I swallowed hardly, my eyes stinging and clouding up, but it seemed like I was out of tears.

My stomach hurt, and my throat was burning. I hadn't eaten or drank anything in a much longer time frame than I was used to. I guess I'd taken readily available food and water for granted in my previously-not-stranded state.

I had a moment where I really considered everything. Was I really going to do this, to try and survive here as long as I could? Were my family and friends really out of reach forever more? Was I really going to act as if I would never be saved, as if no hope of liberation existed, and that it was up to me to provide for myself now, as long as I wanted to be alive? Was this life even worth living anymore, at that? Had everything really changed in the course of a day? The magnitude of the loss almost brought me to my knees.

I couldn't take it all at once. I reached out blindly in the depths of my mind for my previous morning daze to return. I salvaged what bloody tatters were left of my happy place and clutched them close, building up another wall against the unbearable weight of my new situation. I had to take this bit by bit, maybe day by day. Right now, I was hungry and thirsty. That was all.

I sighed and started walking down the pathway, steadily descending my new mountainous home and running through every survival tactic I'd ever gathered. I tried to remember directions in my "Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook." I ran through a mental-showing of _Cast Away_ and wondered if I would go crazy and start talking to a volley ball for companionship. It would probably be a better friend than the Joker… I compiled a list of what-not-to-do from _Lord of the Flies_. No worshipping a pig skull or going all savage. I had glasses, so I had access to fire for cooking and maybe signaling. It was a miracle they'd stayed on my face during the swim to shore…

I figured a good start was looking for fruit and nuts and a clean water source.

I reached the end of the path and had to carefully scramble down the remainder of the mountain, basically just maneuvering through and climbing up and down large rocks. It was an easy final stretch. Taking the path down took me around **a** **third** of the time climbing the whole freaking thing had. I sighed, mentally reprimanding myself again for my stupidity last night, and then set off through the depths of the jungle.

The air was thicker beneath the cover of the trees, tiny pools of flickering sunlight streaming through and dancing across the ground. I heard a whole manner of bird calls and tiny creatures rustling in the leaves. I wasn't beyond appreciating the beauty of this place, but my nerves were on edge, readying me for any sort of animal attack or sudden natural disaster. I picked up a fallen tree branch and carried it around like a spear, just so I had something to whip around in case of an emergency. I sharpened the end of it absent-mindedly with a rock as I walked.

Eventually, I found my shoe, somewhere near the base of the mountain. It was helpful, seeing as stepping on all manner of sticks and sharp rocks was very unpleasant.

I wasn't sure if my multitude of injuries would ever heal properly, seeing as the sand and the forest debris certainly weren't helping my wounds stay clean as they closed. Despite how much it hurt, it felt good to move around. I'd gotten rather stiff sleeping so rigidly in the Joker's embrace. Honestly, even though I was terrified and overwhelmed, I found a sort of strange peacefulness just wandering through nature. If I paid attention to my current situation and really focused on what was going on, I panicked and cried without enough water in me for tears again. But if I just continued on in the moment, the moment of this pure exploration, this unexplored wilderness all around me… It was kind of nice.

I'd wandered through woods at my grandparent's house countless times, until I knew all of the paths and the exact locations of the apple trees. We also had a family gathering up north every year with another fine woods for me to traverse, sticks in hand, mind open and bombarded by the scents, sights, and sounds of the forest. Though I was far from enjoying the pressure of finding food and water before I died and living here until I was somehow found (which was unlikely) or until the Joker killed me (which was more likely), I certainly had enough consciousness of my surroundings to appreciate this brilliant place.

I guess an island wasn't the worst location to be completely alone aside from the company of a sadistic criminal.

I stuck close to the base of the mountain for a while, circling it just to get a feel of how big it was and if there was anything useful close to home. It struck me as odd, how quickly I was referring to that cave as my home. I guess it was the closest thing I had, and in this world of utter chaos and uncertainty and instability, I was clinging to its solidity, primitive as it was.

I walked for what felt like an hour or so, my legs already throbbing a little with the strain. I wasn't the most active or physically fit person in the world. This island was either going to whip me into shape or kill me…

I found plenty of coconuts, but had nothing to carry them in or to break them with. I tucked two under my arms just in case and continued on, the fibers on the outside of the shells tickling my bare arms. The heat became a little overbearing as the day dragged on. Sweat dappled my brow and my upper lip. I ended up removing the draw-string from my shorts and using it as binding to secure a large leaf over the top of my head, to provide some shade.

As I was coming around what I figured was the rear of the mountain range, directly behind the place I started from, I heard something interesting. It was a jagged whispering sound that was very familiar….

_Running water!_

_Oh my God! _

I quickened my pace, stumbling almost blindly with my excitement. I couldn't see anything before me through the trees, leading me to believe it wasn't on the level of the ground. It sounded like it was close by, coming from… _above me_. I turned and faced the mountain range, heading for the stones of the base and hauling myself up, dropping the coconuts there on the sand without a second thought. My parched throat gave me strength to climb when, otherwise, I would've trembled too fiercely half-way up and then would've fallen to my serious injury or death. It took a while, seeing as my eagerness drove me but couldn't make it hurt less, and I eventually crested a hill-like formation in the rock and peered down. I squealed with delight as the pool of water being fed by a waterfall came into my view.

Oh what luck! _Thank you God! Thank you God!_ I really couldn't believe it.

It was so beautiful! So blue and clear and heavenly…

It was almost embedded in the mountain's sloping side, completely surrounded by stone that kept it contained, the fluid protected by rocky, vine-laced walls. The ridge that I had climbed up to and was now leaning over went all the way around, but it wasn't too high above the surface of the water to where one couldn't get back out. The pool appeared fairly deep, having a darker center and a lighter surface that indicated a reasonable change in depth. The edges were the shallowest, almost looking like gently sloping ledges. It was perfect, almost structured like a swimming pool. It even had a few pieces of rock jutting from the walls above it that could be used like diving boards. I almost leapt headlong right into its cerulean depths without thinking, but my curiosity and my caution made me hesitate.

I didn't know if it was fresh or salt water, and really didn't fancy taking another dip in the ocean to get a nice new crust of salt for me and my screaming injuries. I glanced up at the waterfall's mouth. It seemed to be coming from out of the mountain… Perhaps the ocean was feeding through from below, or perhaps there was a spring bubbling up… I can't express how much I wished for a spring of fresh water at that moment.

Admittedly expecting to be disappointed but still nearly mad with thirst and hope, I climbed over the ridge and down the rocks toward the pool. The walls had many ledges near the top, though they got a little slick and featureless the closer I got to the surface of the water, as if the water level was likely to change and wear away the stone. It probably flooded slightly during heavy rains. After slipping a few times and acquiring a small cut on my palm from a sharp rock, I reached the base of the wall. Almost holding my breath with excitement and dread in equal parts, I settled onto one of the gently sloping edges, staring at the glimmering wonder that was the pool before me, below me, around me. The water was cool against my ankles, gliding gently in my shoes, and I was overwhelmingly pleased when the blisters and gashes in my feet didn't immediately sting and burn.

The water was fresh. _Hallelujah_.

I then proceeded to wade messily forward off the shallow ledge and into the deeper depths of the pool, submerging myself without further hesitation. The coolness swirled around me like liquid heaven, easing the tropical heat and finally getting that sticky, sweaty, gritty, sandy feeling to leave me alone. I sighed a cloud of blissful bubbles, closing my eyes and drifting in that dreamy moment before I came up for air at least. With my breath restored, I then plunged my head under the surface of the water and proceeded to gulp large mouthfuls of it down. It sang as it slid down my throat.

A part of my mind acknowledged how the water could have a hazardously-high mineral content or exotic bacteria in it, but at that point, I was too happy to care. I figured sickness was a better cause of death than dehydration, if I could choose.

After around twenty minutes of lazing about in that blessed pool, I swam to the shallow edge and clambered out. I'd found a source of water, and now I needed some food, some method of carrying everything I was finding, things like that. I resituated the leaf upon my head, ringing out my long, sopping hair. I sat in the sun until I was no longer dripping, waiting to be dry enough that sand wouldn't stick to me again before I descended back to the forest floor. Before I did so, I happened to glance out over the tops of the trees.

I saw the reef out on the horizon – and I saw the ship.

I realized then that I'd just assumed it had sunk completely. Of course parts of it would've gotten stuck on the reef. Perhaps there was a chance of gathering supplies, salvaging clothes or food or anything from its flooded depths of cabins and hallways… That would be a good place to proceed. My stomach was moaning now, happy with the water I'd found but still desiring more sustenance. I was starting to feel really woozy and light-headed. I'd never been pleasant when hungry.

I climbed back down to the ground and picked up the coconuts I'd left there. I put one up against the mountain's side and grabbed a small rock from the ground. I then tried to hammer it open, striking again and again at the brown, fibrous surface as hard as I could. I remembered it being hard in _Cast Away_, but _damn_, I just couldn't get it. I eventually gave up on that one and tossed it aside, retrieving the other coconut I'd brought from the sand and hammering that one for a few minutes.

It cracked a little, enough for me to drink some of the milk out. I'll admit, I wasn't a huge fan of coconut stuff – I didn't like too much of it on cookies or cupcakes, and I certainly wouldn't buy _Mounds_ or _Almond Joys_ before a _Twix_ or a _Milky Way Midnight_ at the grocery store. The milk was very much coconut milk and, as such, was something I didn't drink a whole lot of. I tried breaking the rest of the nut open and only got a shard of the shell to cave in. I fished the broken piece out of the depths of the coconut and brought it out, biting at the white lining. Again, a whole lot of coconut, but it was something.

It wasn't like I really had the option to be picky here, with the island making me acquire certain tastes if I wanted to live.

I kept working at the more agreeable shell as I headed out towards the beach, leaving my sharpened staff in the sand near the mountain so I'd know where the pool was when I came back later, hopefully with some sort of container so I could stock up the cave and get some survival supplies forming.

Eventually I cleared the cover of the trees and emerged out onto the sand. The sun was immediately hotter. I realized how much I wanted sunscreen. I was never a "sun child," and I doubted this island would change my mind without some pain coming along with it.

I'd taken a bit of a wrong turn on my way out to the shore, so I had to walk along the beach for a few minutes before I found my destination. The reef was out a ways from the island, and the wreckage of the _Ocean Angel 5_ was balancing hazardously on top of it, a big eye-sore that cut into the lovely expanse of the blue horizon like a hellish, misplaced puzzle piece.

Sitting on the shore before the ruin was the Joker.

I paused as my daze shivered. My half-eaten coconut _thunked_ onto the sand.

Seeing him reminded me of just how inescapable this reality was, all that had happened to bring me to this horrific state. I blinked, swallowed, and continued forward.

I stopped beside him, staring down at him without comprehension.

How long had he been sitting here? Why had he come here to begin with?

_What the hell?_ That was my general question.

He didn't look up or smile creepily at me or anything like that.

"Banana?" he asked, holding up one of the familiar yellow fruits for me to take. There was a bunch of them in front of him, lying in the sand with one or two empty peels.

I blinked, too taken aback to figure out if I should whack it out of his hand or take it and scarf it down or ask him where he found it or start beating him over the head with it.

He glanced up when I didn't respond, giving me the amused smile I'd hoped to avoid.

"_Now, now_, you _need_ to **make sure** you, _uh,_ get enough _**potassium**_," he said, waving the banana in my face.

It was then that I took the fruit from him, ripping it rather roughly from his hand so he didn't get the impression that I was willingly accepting his help or anything like that. My stomach was still growling, and I figured I would be better suited to fighting against his reign of terror if I wasn't weak from hunger. I tore open the top of the banana and took a big, obnoxious bite.

"_Admiring your handiwork?_" I asked him bitterly, my mouth full enough to distort my voice a little as I turned and faced the remaining wreckage of the ship, like he was doing.

A brief silence full of washing water and distant calling sea birds stretched between us.

"…Isn't it b –?" he started to say, but I cut him off by whipping my banana against the side of his face. It made a dry, slapping sound.

"Don't you _**DARE**_ say beautiful!" I shrieked, unable to take how often he referred to me as well as absolute carnage in that way. I couldn't take it anymore, the way he corrupted a word for good and elegance with his insanity and his malice.

There was a fraction of a second where his eyes were wide with something like surprise, and then he just laughed, a great manic whooping laugh that I'd sometimes heard on news reports with clips from security cameras when he'd robbed banks or killed politicians or something. It made me shudder, the remainder of my banana quaking in my hand. The top part that I'd been eating had broken off upon impact and landed in the sand a few feet behind us, leaving only the bottom half that was still enclosed in my fist and the peel itself. I'd just hit the Joker with a banana. The ridiculousness of it all was rather funny, but I didn't feel like laughing.

I ran a suddenly-clammy hand across my forehead, dislodging my leaf-hat, and crumpled to the sand.

Now that I had some water in me from the pool, the tears could come.

He upset me so much so fast – made me not myself with just a moment's bout of patronizing words or provoking behavior. He got right under my skin and picked at my frazzled nerves and I snapped within seconds, all the time… I was so unstable around him, and he was unstable in general, so this was a match made in unstable hell...

"…What the hell were you thinking?" I asked quietly, speaking through the enclosure of my arms to the Joker, "You wrecked a ship full of innocence people, made them fight for their lives that you took away from them anyway, and then made _me_ be the one that was left… Why the hell would you do that? What would possess you to – _Why me?_ _What are we going to do now?_"

I lifted up my head and glared at him, tears streaming down my face.

"_**What the hell are we going to do now?**_" I shouted, crushing the remains of my banana in my fist. It squished out between my fingers, dribbling on the sand, and it felt nasty but I didn't care. My scream seemed to echo off the mountain range behind us and then fade into oblivion.

The Joker and I had a stare-down, neither one of us speaking.

I panted slightly, recovering my breath, before I hurled the remains of my banana into the sea and wrapped my arms around myself, settling with a big huff on the sand once more, thinking how silly I was for expecting a logical answer from a psychopath once again. It wasn't like the crazy bastard had answered any of my previous questions – why would I expect him to answer now?

It was then that the Joker stood up with a drunken, lolling motion and headed toward the water. I glanced up, drying my tears with my fingers and watching him with cautious confusion.

"This _migh-tuh_ be a _**start**_…" I heard him murmur, as if it wasn't totally directed at me, and he waded a few feet into the ocean and lifted a small, dripping brown suitcase up for me to see. Huh – that was oddly practical of him. He tossed it on the sand, almost hitting me with it, giggling to himself as I lurched out of the way and glared. Well, it seems like we were both thinking along the same lines of salvaging things from the boat. Who knew the Joker and I would have a similar thought?

He continued to search rather lazily (or maybe he was just swimming) through the water while I opened up the suitcase. It was full of clothing, that of a middle-aged man. It made sense for a small suitcase. The guy was probably on his own, and men never packed as much as women. I laid out the shirts and pants on the beach, where the sun could dry them. There were also some belts and socks and shoes, and the suitcase itself was useful as a container. When it was all laid out and beyond the reach of the ocean's pulsing waves, I turned around and saw that the Joker had dragged another suitcase and some twisted pieces of metal, no doubt from the ship's smashed hull, up onto the sand.

The new suitcase seemed to be toiletries, which was nice because they were packed in a plastic bag and hadn't been damaged in the crash or the surf.

As I thought about it, I realized that unpacking the first suitcase and laying the wet clothes in the sand was kind of stupid, seeing as I would want to wash them to get the sand off, hence making them wet again and taking them unnecessarily out of their container… Oh well.

Assuming the Joker didn't kill me suddenly over the next few days or hours or minutes or whatever, I had plenty of time to figure out how best to use all of our supplies later. We could use the pieces of metal for weapons or build things out of them… I guess I was happy that we certainly weren't completely without materials to work with.

We traversed the beach near the boat up and down, gathering more suit cases and various bits of various things. I didn't try to start conversation or ask any more futile questions. The Joker hummed some random tune to himself sometimes. When we'd found most of what was close at hand, we turned our attention to the shipwreck.

"You think it's safe to go inside of it?" I asked rather hesitantly, fearful of what treacherous dangers might await us if we reentered something that was half-sunken and probably completely unstable.

"Probably not," the Joker muttered with an audible smack of his lips. I glanced at him, noticing how the wounds I'd left when I'd clawed his face yesterday were still there, still healing. He then turned, gave me an unsettlingly-wide grin, and strode toward the water.

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**Okay, there it is! Read and review! I'll try to keep the creative momentum going!**

**Thanks for reading! 3**


	10. Inside Metal Jaws

**Hey guys! You reviewed the last chapter so quickly and so positively, I had to continue. Thank you so much. It all means a lot to me to hear that you like my work. You rock!**

**Here's the next chapter. Sadly, it's kind of the end of my current inspiration, so the rest of the story might take a little while longer after this, but I'll keep at it. I do want to finish this.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own the Joker or Gotham or whatnot. Those belong to DC Comics and Christopher Nolan. The OC is me, and mine.**

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Tropical Torment

Chapter 10

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The Joker strolled rather unevenly across the sand, heading for the ship that was half-sunken out on the reef. I hesitated right where I was, once again, trying to acutely analyze the situation and judge whether or not this was the best way to proceed as quickly as I could. Salvaging the ship was still a good choice for our next move – I couldn't deny that. There were things there we just wouldn't find on the island.

It had just seemed so much simpler when I'd seen the ship from a distance, further inland up on the freshwater pool's ledge. Now that I was on the shore, I could see how frightening the wreckage looked, so many jagged edges and shattered support systems. The hole in the bottom of the ship's hull looked like vast, grinning jaws. It was like a sea-side haunted house.

I also remembered how long of a swim it had been from the wreck when we'd first arrived on the island – this certainly wouldn't be a fast search, and we would be _carrying things_ back and forth as well, if we even managed to get back out of the ship. And then there were sharks and jellyfish and a whole manner of dangerous oceanic animals to watch out for…

Part of me wanted to back out and let the ship rot away and sink undisturbed. The Joker and I could just collect coconuts and bananas for the rest of the day…and maybe for the rest of our lives…

The fact that he was getting closer and closer to the water made me feel like my window of opportunity for backtracking from this idea was closing faster than I was making a decision, but I realized it wasn't really up to me whether or not he went out to the ship. It wasn't like he listened to me, anyway… Maybe he would get killed out there. Maybe the ship would collapse on him and drown him in those pretty blue depths, and then I would have one less thing to worry about…

Still, I couldn't get around the fact that I was curious about what was left after the crash. I didn't know what the Joker would consider worth bringing back from the ship, if he even brought anything back at all. I couldn't just leave him to this task. I wanted to search for myself.

Finally, my feet moved. I walked forward across the sand, heading for the shoreline that the Joker had already reached. The water was up to his ankles and he shrugged out of his purple jacket, tossing it back onto the beach, out of the reach of the waves. I guessed it impeded his ability to swim easily, remembering how it had made him look like some drunken manta ray yesterday.

I didn't take anything off – I'd never had a problem swimming in clothes, and mine were far from troublesome at this point, just shorts and a t-shirt. I also didn't feel like showing off my underwear to the Joker. I'd rather have to wash the salt off of my clothes again in the freshwater pool than feel any more vulnerable and exposed in front of him…

I took my shoes off as I entered the surf so I didn't lose them in the water, but I held onto them because I figured it would be good to have them on when we entered the shipwreck. I didn't want to step on broken glass or electrical wires or anything like that. The water was cool, but not cold. It felt good after being on the hot sand. I so wished I was just swimming in the ocean with my family on vacations like I had so many times before, but I couldn't make myself believe the lie.

I waded deeper and deeper out into the sea, the sand soft and smooth against my feet. The repeated washing of the waves had beaten it into the tiniest of grains, smaller than the chunks of shells and coral that littered the edge of the beach. The wreck of the _Ocean Angel 5 _was still quite a ways off on the reef, looming hideously on the midday horizon. The sun was high in the sky, glimmering off of the surface of the water, the tiny light rays dancing along the bottom.

The Joker was already out far enough that he was swimming freely, groping awkwardly through the water as he headed for the reef. He made small, musically-unrelated humming noises every time he reached forward with his arms for another stroke.

His movements vaguely reminded me of the swimming sequence of Link from the more recent _Legend of Zelda_ games, like _Twilight Princess_ and _Skyward Sword_, before he'd gotten anything that let him swim gracefully below the waves like the Zora armor or the Water Dragon's Scale. It had always seemed like a strange, inefficient way of traveling through water, and the Joker doing it didn't make it seem any more sensible…

I missed video games. What if a new _Zelda_ game came out and I never got to play it? I shook my head slightly, knowing I couldn't keep grieving over everything I'd lost. It wasn't even guaranteed to be lost. Even if it was, I had bigger things to worry about than video games. I just…I had to focus on the task at hand. I had to focus on getting what we could from the ship and surviving. I quickened my pace, heading out until I couldn't walk along the bottom anymore.

We weren't even half-way there yet… I tried not to sigh heavily, for risk of accidentally inhaling a bunch of salt water. My lips already had the unpleasant taste of the sea on them. I wished I had goggles or something so I could look down into the water below me without making my eyes sting. I'd observe any tiny crustaceans or fish that might be cruising below me to pass the time and make the swim go faster – and, also, look out for sharks…

Just as I was trying to push the _Jaws_ theme-music from my mind, I noticed a dark, blurry shape below the water in front of me. I paused, treading at the surface and trying to discern whether or not the object was alive. My stomach flipped over when I realized what it was: a human arm, sunken and bloated with too much water. The ragged end was still being nipped at by some small fish. I looked up, unable to handle the scene below me, only to see that there were many other things scattered along the bottom and floating just below the surface…

Dead bodies. Too many to count. I knew that there were people who didn't survive the wreck and the swim to shore. I knew that there would be dead people in the water, and that the ocean wouldn't let that go to waste. I just hadn't braced myself for the full effect of swimming right beside the carnage. I began to hyperventilate, my arms and legs not working well enough to let me stay afloat very well. I began to choke on water as I scrambled to turn around and head back to the shore.

Something grabbed my hand, making me scream loudly. I whirled, staring at the Joker wide-eyed and traumatized. Wordlessly, he pulled me through the water toward the ship, where the bodies were more-concentrated. I shrank and flinched away from them as much as I could, but they still brushed my legs on occasion. My stomach churned with my disgust.

The many crime shows that I used to watch with my family at night had disturbed me a little with how well the media had gotten at portraying death and what was left after it. I wasn't a squeamish individual, and I'd rather thought that all of the TV I'd watched would've desensitized me to things like this, but I was wrong. This whole situation was incredibly unsettling to me, far too real and present and tangible. I was rather surprised that I wasn't vomiting.

I didn't know how long the Joker swam through a gory sea and tugged me along beside him. It could've been ten seconds or it could've been ten days. I didn't know why he was doing it, either – maybe he wanted to keep me close so that I couldn't run off somewhere without him and ruin his little game. Maybe he wanted to show me something hideous or kill me on the boat. I had no idea why he would care whether or not I was there with him.

Really, I just tried to forget where I was and what was happening. I closed my eyes and felt the water stream gently, almost apologetically across my skin, and didn't respond to anything else until my knee hit something hard below the waves. It hurt enough to make me cry out. We'd reached the reef, and my knee was bleeding where I'd nicked some coral. I was immediately aware of how I was probably summoning sharks from miles away, but I still had enough awareness to hope that I hadn't damaged the coral.

I knew the reefs were important for oceanic ecosystems and I didn't want my clumsiness to cost this beautiful place anything. We weren't allowed near the reefs on snorkeling trips for that reason. Humans were so invasive in the natural world… I was careful now to watch where I let my limbs hang uselessly in the water so I didn't damage anything else. The Joker continued to pull me along by my limp wrist, not saying a word. He wasn't humming anymore, either.

Finally, the reef thickened and reached high enough that it broke the surface, letting waves leap against it in bursts of white spray. It was harder to swim around there, with the water washing back and forth so harshly. Still, it wasn't as dangerous as the one in _Cast Away_ had been, when it had almost smashed Tom Hanks.

The Joker clambered up on the rocks, almost slipping back off the other side before he gained some semblance of footing, and then pulled me up beside him.

"_**Up-suh-daisy!**_" he said, startling me at the sound of his voice, seeing as I hadn't heard him speak in what felt like quite some time.

He released my hand after I cleared the water. I swayed unevenly on my own, wincing as the reef bit into my feet. I quickly put my shoes back on, very glad that I'd brought them with me. The wreckage of the ship was looming a few yards away from us, spearing high into the sky like some ghastly, mechanical mountain range. The spray of the sea spattered against my face, making me taste salt on my tongue. My injured knee was throbbing and burning.

I stood there for a moment, almost in a dream. It felt like a good point to wake up – the ocean of dead bodies had already been cleared, at least in the sense that it was all around me but I wasn't currently _**in**_ it, and we were just about to walk into the very heart of darkness. Dreams never carried on in such a way. A dream wouldn't make me actually go through with this. My subconscious wasn't that cruel… And then I realized it wasn't a dream at all. This was too hellish to be anything but the truth.

The Joker strolled forward across the rocky crest of the reef, heading for the ship. I could hear him licking his lips above the sound of the crashing waves, which was weird. The salt water must've been stinging the cuts I'd left when I scratched him, but he didn't seem to mind at all.

I followed after him, taking careful steps and trying not to fall back into the water, limping on my hurt leg. I saw the remains of the annoying stewardess from the day before, the one that had tried to prevent me from going and talking to "the captain." Her eyes were wide and staring and she bumped mindlessly against the edge reef, nudged by the waves again and again. Her legs weren't there anymore.

I gulped, swallowing the rising bile in my throat, and focused on staring at the ship, which wasn't much more comforting…

The Joker and I reached the entrance, the giant hole that had been created when the boat rammed into the reef.

He leaned around the corner, peering into the darkness from the side like they do in cartoons. He chuckled to himself, and didn't explain what was so funny. I didn't care to ask.

"_**Shall we**_, then?" he asked, stepping aside for me and extending his hand with a bow, as if he were accompanying me to some beautiful dance.

I made a face, hating how much he mocked any sort of normalcy when all I so desperately craved right now was for something to make sense and be perfectly acceptable. Him welcoming me into a sinking ship was far from normal, and I knew I wasn't the only one thinking that. He did it to bother me, I was sure.

I brushed past him coldly, without meeting his eyes, and I heard by his footsteps that he followed me into the wounded, dying ship.

The halls were dark and flooded, water filling the majority of the passages near the entry hole up to my waist. The salt made my knee sting. We'd entered the lower part of the ship, and the amount of water made that evident. Most of the electricity was out, ornate hallway lights occasionally sparking with radiance before going black once again. Some of the rooms were locked. Some of the doors were already broken down. There was still the occasional floating corpse, even so far inside.

We couldn't enter most of the back end of the ship, just because it was already submerged. I didn't fancy swimming down there and trying to look for stuff in the dark, anyway. That gave me chills and reminded me of the film, _The Abyss,_ when they'd found bits of (what I'd always thought was) floating lettuce and ship debris and dead men with crabs crawling out of their mouths.

The Joker and I eventually split up – He more or less just wandered off in a direction I didn't really feel like going, down a random hallway that was darker than the others. I felt better after he was gone. He remained in the shadowed, lower levels of the ship and I headed higher, wanting to get out of the cold wetness.

I passed the control room with the door still knocked down, which let me see the steering wheel of the ship and the blood all over the floor. The dead captain's body, already showing signs of putrefaction, had been hurled into the corner during impact and was now splayed in a crumpled, bloody heap on the ground. I hated that room and everything it had started in my life right now. I hated myself for going to see the captain, for finding the Joker, for "catching his fancy" or whatever it had been that had let _**me**_ be the one that was still alive instead of all of those passengers.

I shook my head and left the room behind, entering a random nearby bedroom instead and looking around for anything useful. I couldn't hate myself for everything that had happened. That wouldn't get me anywhere. The bottom line was that I was still alive, and that being alive was better than being dead because it put me in a position where I could take action and make a difference. Perhaps I was still alive because I was meant to do something that I hadn't done yet.

Yeah. Something like that… Blood dribbled down my injured leg.

The room had a bed that was flipped over but not ruined. I gathered some of the blankets, remembering how much I'd wanted them last night when the tropical island sun had gone down and left a cold cavern to sleep in. I didn't know if the chairs or tables would be of any use. I guessed we could use them for fire-wood or something… Still, I wasn't sure how well I could carry them all the way back to the island. I looked around for other things that could be useful, especially things more easy to transport.

I found a purse and a few more suitcases. I cleaned out the drawers of clothing, more adult stuff that I wouldn't fit in very well but that was still better than wearing the same outfit for the rest of my life. There were also more toiletries like shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, and soap in the bathroom. I tore down the curtains, thinking we could make clothes or a sail for a boat or shield the inside of the cave from the elements or something like that.

There didn't seem to be much else I could use in that room, so I left.

My arms were already almost full. This wasn't promising if I needed to search…probably over fifty more rooms. I found a staircase that led to the upper decks and dropped my first load of stuff off there. I wanted to gather a bit more before I left the general vicinity of this floor. After resting on the stairs and tying a towel around my cut knee, I set off again on my search.

One room had a dead elderly couple in it, so I didn't go in there. Their resemblance to my grandparents made me cry for a little while. In the other rooms, I found more clothes and blankets, more toiletries. I salvaged a copy of the Bible – I was definitely going to need that if I wanted to remain sane…

Then it hit me how I might never get to go to Church again. I might never get to receive the Body and Blood of Christ again… I paused, the magnitude of it making me feel weak. Missing one Sunday Mass made me feel uneasy, but now I might miss _all of the rest of them?_ I slowly sagged against the nearest wall, trembling slightly.

I couldn't believe how much my faith had slipped from my mind since this whole, hideous ordeal had come about. It was ridiculous how far I'd fallen… But I wasn't done yet. It was always advised to cling to faith in times of adversity, because God was closer than ever. I couldn't give up on him now… I said the _Our Father_ repeatedly as I continued to explore the rooms of dead people.

After I'd searched ten rooms and compiled quite a haul of various items in the stairwell, I decided to head up onto the deck and get some fresh air – the bowels of the boat smelt of death and moist, mildew-y decay and I couldn't take any more of it.

I squinted in the harsh afternoon sun, my eyes having become accustomed to the damp darkness within the ship. All of the deck chairs and tables with fruity drinks on them had long since smashed into the back of the ship or fallen into the sea. Towels were strewn all over the place.

The entire ship was tilted, making my movements across this flat surface rather difficult. I kept close to the railing and crept cautiously down toward the lower portion of the deck. The pools had spilled and were half drained. Much of the drinks at the bar had evaporated in the sun's heat, and I wasn't quite old enough yet to have alcohol… That seemed rather silly, but it was true.

I found some novelty bottles and large cups with sealable lids that could be used to carry water back from the freshwater spring and store it in the cave so we didn't have to go all the way down there every time we were thirsty. I grabbed as many as I could carry while still being able to hold onto the railing and headed back up to the stairs, putting the cups with everything else I'd gathered.

I moved up to the front of the ship, but there wasn't much there. It was smashed to hell after the impact, and anything useful there had fallen into the sea or slid down to the back of the boat. I glanced over the edge of the railing and started with surprise – there was still a lifeboat attached to the side. That was perfect! We could get all of the stuff we found across without ruining it in the water!

I leaned over the edge, reaching for the rigging that was secured against the side of the boat. My fingers successfully curled around the rope and I hauled the lifeboat upward to being level with my face. I grabbed the side and pulled, but it wouldn't move much, only swinging slightly more than before.

It was heavier than I first expected. Perhaps the rigging mechanism was jammed as well. The crane-like apparatus above my head did look a little crooked. I pulled again, only budging the lifeboat. It wouldn't come loose enough for me to get it inside the ship.

Suddenly another pair of hands, encased in purple gloves, latched onto the side. I started, looking over to see the Joker suddenly standing beside me. He was sopping wet, his green hair curled and dripping, his make-up beginning to run down his face in grotesque streams.

"_Well done_, Beautiful. This will _certainly_, uh _**come in han-dy**_…" he said with approval. I didn't say anything, still recovering from the shock of his appearance and wondering why I hadn't heard him approach. I put some sort of biting retort out of my mind and just settled on tugging on the lifeboat again. With his help, we were able to release it from the busted rigging and successfully haul it onto the deck of the _Ocean Angel 5_.

"Where were you?" I asked without really being curious, feeling like it was a proper thing to ask at this point after we'd been apart for so long. I began to carefully crawl back down to the middle part of the ship, trying to hold onto the railing and prevent the lifeboat from slipping out of my grasp at the same time. If we let go, it would slide all the way down and probably smash into all of the junk gathered at the back of the ship, and then we were out a means of transportation for all of our supplies.

"Grabbing some _**yummy**__ cooking supplies_ from the _**galley**_," the Joker replied with a snicker, as if knowing the terminology of the ship was somehow vastly amusing to him. He didn't seem to have too much trouble with the sloped terrain of the tilted ship, but I figured that was probably because he walked like he was on top of a giant Jell-O mold _all the time_. This ground was finally weird enough to suit his bizarre manner of walking, making him appear almost normal.

Getting cooking supplies was an oddly practical thing of him to do. I'd rather expected him to just have been swimming around in the flooded rooms and maybe giggling at the bodies of the people he'd killed. He'd actually done something helpful to our continued survival. I cleared my face of surprise or approval before he noticed and commented on it.

We returned to the stairwell where I'd stored all of my stuff from my first round of room-inspections. The Joker had placed the large pots, pans, and various knives and implements that he'd gathered from the kitchen there as well. They would be good for storage, and maybe for hunting if there were any sort of pigs or deer on the island. I wondered if I could use them for self-defense, as well, should the need arise…

We put about half of what we'd gathered in the lifeboat, seeing as we didn't want it to sink. Together, we hauled the lifeboat down the stairs until we reached the flooded portion of the ship. There, the boat floated and was much easier to maneuver. The Joker made the first round of taking the lifeboat to shore and unloading it and bringing it back. My knee was still bleeding, and I didn't want to chum sharks – or swim through all of the dead bodies again. I gathered more stuff from the rooms while I waited for him to return. The ship groaned and quaked on occasion, unnerving me even further…

It took us hours to get all of our loads to shore and come back for more. The sun was beginning to go down by the time we'd finished, too tired to continue. We'd been at this all day, and I could feel it. My muscles were aching and my skin stung all over with a terrible sunburn. I didn't remember the last time I'd exerted myself so much physically, and this was _after_ the strain of yesterday, without _any time_ to recover. _Ugh_…

I'd been forced to swim back through the bodies and risk a shark attack when The Joker and I made our final trip back to shore, seeing as the lifeboat had been full of stuff we didn't want to lose, but I made it without losing my mind or my limbs.

We'd got an entire wardrobe of clothing of all sorts, pots and pans for cooking and transportation, all sorts of bags and purses for carrying things, knives for hunting and protection, quite a few things to keep our hygiene in check, bedding to make the cave a little more comfortable, and the Joker had even found some food in the kitchen – some meat and veggies that hadn't completely thawed and rotted yet in light of the freezer system failing.

Even with all we gathered, I was sure we'd missed a lot.

The best things that we'd managed to gather, in my opinion, were the books and all of the paper and writing utensils. I'd found all sorts of novels and travel guides and magazines in the belongings of the dead passengers, some things familiar to me and others not so much. I found plenty of notebooks and a few journals that had been barely started – the ones that had been started or almost finished already were more on the reading-material end of my interest.

I was a small comfort in light of how difficult everything still was, but they meant the world to me. I was a writer, and the ability to keep writing was a gift from the heavens.

I sat on the edge of the mouth of the cave, my feet dangling over into the empty air, eating a banana and drinking coconut milk as I watched the sun go down.

We'd left a lot of the stuff on shore, a lot of the cooking supplies and some of the bedding and clothing, things we could pick up tomorrow after they dried off more. I took my books and papers with me, setting them out to dry in various spaces around the inside of the cavern. I was clinging to them with everything I had aside from actually physically holding everything in my arms at the moment.

I could smell the mouth-watering scent of meat cooking behind me. The Joker had made a small fire pit in the center of the cave and was cooking some of the steaks we'd salvaged from the ship. When they were done enough, he speared them with sticks and brought one to me. I hadn't really expected him to do that, so my thanks sounded rather awkward.

He sat down next to me, a few feet away so that I wasn't too uncomfortable, and began to noisily tear at his meat. I hadn't expected him to have stunningly eloquent table manners, so this wasn't as surprising to me. The watery red juice dribbled down his chin, and I looked away, gnawing at my own stake as quietly as I could. I'd never liked the noises of chewing, be they mine or someone else's.

The sunset was positively gorgeous, brilliant with reds and oranges and violets. I wished I'd found some crayons or markers to capture the sight in one of my new journals. I reached over and grabbed the nearest notebook I'd acquired that day, a thick brown one with slightly yellowed pages. It was my favorite one, so full of paper for me to write upon with a hard, heavy cover made of some sort of cardboard-like material – sturdy and resistant to damage. It was perfect.

The Joker must've noticed my expression as I stared at the book, because he then spoke up and startled me by saying, "Well, _**that's**_ the, uh, _first time_ I've seen you _**smile**_…"

I looked up at him, caught off guard by the personal focus of his observation.

"Um… well, I'm a _writer_, so… This is one of the first reasons I've had since the ship crashed to smile…" I murmured, blushing slightly and trying to sort through my tangled emotions. Would it come across like I was trying to blame him and make him feel bad? Was it like I was trying to avoid giving him any sort of window into my deeper passions and interests? Would he think I was pitying myself and being ungrateful about being alive yet again? I wasn't even sure exactly what I'd meant when I said that, so…

"_Hmm…_" the Joker mused, as if deep in thought. I wondered what kind of thoughts he went deeply into. He turned away, taking his sharp black gaze off of my face to stare out at the jungle below us. I rather expected him to comment on how _**beautiful**_ my smile was or something, just because he seemed to enjoy pressing that button, but he was oddly quiet for a raving lunatic.

I followed his gaze, staring out at the ocean that was now glistening with the light of the moon.

I'd made it through an entire day, getting up and going back to sleep on this island.

I couldn't help but sigh heavily as a sense of exhausted dread pressed down on my chest.

"This is going to be the longest time of my life, isn't it?" I asked out loud, more to myself but still audible to the Joker. I knew not to assume that the Joker wouldn't kill me just because he hadn't killed me yet, but it kind of felt that way. I had a sense that I would be waking up here and eating fruit and fish and going back to sleep here for a long time.

The Joker laughed loudly all of a sudden, as if I'd said something hilarious. It scared the hell out of me and made me drop the coconut shell I'd been holding. The discarded brown casing clinked as it bounced down the mountainside…

"And _**you**_ thought it was going to be the _**shortest**_ only yesterday…" the Joker said, throwing his head back and laughing again so that the moonlight glimmered on his teeth and his lips and his scars.

I didn't see what was so funny about that, but I didn't bother to question it.

I got up and went inside the cavern, leaving him out there with the echoes of his own laughter. The fire was dying, but it provided just enough light for me to locate a sharp charcoal pencil from my stash in a crevice of the cave. I opened up my favorite notebook and put two tiny tally-marks in the front cover.

Then I opened to the first page, wrote "Day 1," and started recording my time in paradise with the Clown Prince of Crime.

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**There you go! Read and review!  
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**Thank you again, so very much! 3**


	11. Melting Away

**Hello everyone, if anyone's still there. I'm sorry this has taken so long. I've been so freaking busy, it's ridiculous.**

**I'm trying to finish a novel, and I thought I'd do another chapter of this kind of as a warm-up, but this has taken me two days and I'm just so done with it right now. I wrote 11 pages of stuff, but it just wasn't going where I wanted it to go. The only part I had really thought out was the beginning portion, which I'm sharing with you now. I kept trying with the rest of the chapter, but it was just giving me hell and I didn't like it. I didn't want to give you crap, even if this update is kind of small instead… It's not my best but it's all I got.**

**Ugh. I'll keep messing with it and might either add it onto here or build it into its own chapter, because I know there needs to be more than this, but… I'm kind of making up the story as I go along, to the point where I'm really struggling with handling the infinite possibilities I could do with this. Living on a deserted island is going to have its intense days and its kind-of-lame days, meaning the story parts are probably going to have a wide range of intensity and calmness. There are going to be parts that aren't as good as other parts. It's going to get choppy – parts might be severely different lengths, or be kind of unresolved. I guess I'm starting to see how much sense it makes with a story like this, seeing as the plot and characters and whatnot are in such a random scenario full of potential, and I'm almost seriously writing it as it would happen, but… I just hope I don't disappoint my readers.**

**Please read and review, and tell me what you think.**

**So, very late and small and full of apology, here is (basically the introduction to) Chapter 11 of Tropical Torment.**

**Disclaimer: The Joker belongs to DC Comics and Christopher Nolan. I own my OC.**

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Tropical Torment

Chapter 11

I walked through the shadows below the trees, the shade a welcome relief from the midday sun. The forest was strangely quiet, but I could hear the sound of roaring water nearby. I soon reached the mouth of the fresh-water pool with the ever-pounding waterfall. It was beautiful still, even after I'd completely accepted the fact that it really did exist.

It was then that I noticed a shape moving beneath the water, rising swiftly upward.

Before I could think to hide or back up or anything, it broke the surface.

With great surprise, I realized that it was a young man.

My first few thoughts probably should've been wondering who he was, seeing as I'd never seen him before, and speculation concerning how he'd gotten on the island with me. But no. My brain stopped dead on matters it deemed more pressing, like the fact that he was very attractive and very much naked.

I couldn't really see anything below his waist due to the fact that it was underwater, and the ripples and light glimmers distorted everything, but I was still more than content with only getting to see his waist up. His skin was taught and bronzed with the tropical sunshine, stretched over an appealing physique. His muscles were prominent enough that I could kind of trace them with my eyes, yet they were far from obnoxious or intimidating. I was mesmerized by how the water was glistening as it ran down his body in entrancing little rivulets.

And his face… His jaw line was sculpted, with prominent cheekbones and chin. His hair was a brownish blonde, both lightened by the sunshine and darkened by the water dripping from the tousled strands.

As he came up out of the water, he exhaled heavily, rubbing his hand across his eyes to prevent any water from getting in them. He then shook his head to get the excess moisture out of his hair before sweeping it back out of his way. The action caused some of the droplets of water to spatter against my face. They seemed to send a shock of cool moisture across my skin, a sensation that made my breath catch audibly in my throat.

He heard it, turning with a start and looking at me with his eyes finally open for me to see. They were dark, but not frightening. He blinked with surprise, but didn't look upset or anything about me being there. That was a relief, even if I was still a little uncertain about him and the current situation.

Just having his eyes on me - I felt a blush immediately warm my cheeks.

He wiped his hand down his mouth, catching any last stray drops of water without looking away from me. And then he tilted his head and smiled. The sunlight glinted off of his teeth, his grin wide and welcoming. My heart gave a little hiccup in my chest.

_Holy Lord…_

I opened my mouth to try and say something, maybe apologize for staring at him while he was swimming or whatever, but no sound came out. I couldn't think in a remotely coherent fashion with him watching me like that with such a charming smile on his face.

Seriously, his smile was like… wow.

The man chuckled, as if amused at my speechlessness, and then he moved through the water toward me. Little waves formed around his waist with his movement, ripples spreading outward from him as he smoothly approached me.

Again, it should've been rather instinctual to back away from strangers, but I lacked any and all mobility at that moment. It seemed my heart was thrumming fast enough to compensate for any other stillness on my part.

The man and I were now face to face, me slightly above him with how the depth of the water made him a little shorter in comparison.

"See something ya' like?" he asked in a voice so deep and delightful that I almost lost myself in it. At such proximity, the sound almost seemed to reverberate pleasurably throughout my body. He had a slight accent, the origin of which I couldn't place, which only made him more interesting.

"…Uh…" I managed, having to swallow again just to stop salivating.

He reached up and brushed his thumb across my cheek, letting me feel the appealing roughness of his skin accompanied by the way the water on my face and his hand made contact between us feel cool and slick. I could only give a strangled gulp, my face reddening even further at his touch.

He paused for just a moment, his eyes moving around my face, as if taking in every detail of my appearance and my expression and my deepest desires… Then his dark gaze dropped to settle on my slightly-open mouth.

"…'Cause I do," he said, answering his own question from before, and with that he leaned and pressed his lips to mine.

I stiffened, my eyes widening as I took in a quick gasp of air through my nose. Everything trembled and shivered for a moment. But then I realized how good it felt, and any resistance or awkwardness melted away. My eyes closed softly, my blood pulsing through my veins, throbbing warmly in my lips. My heart was pounding in my head as I leaned further over the edge of the rocks, pressing into him, returning the kiss with passion and enthusiasm.

The man chuckled in between kisses, cupping the side of my face in his hand and keeping me close. He drew back slightly, beckoning me into the water with him. I leaned forward as far as I could, trying to get my legs over the edge of the pool without hurting myself. There was quite a splash when I finally fell into the water the rest of the way, one that soaked my clothes and hair and splattered all over the two of us.

Our lips hadn't separated once.

He pulled me against him with an arm around my waist.

The water swirled about us.

I could feel the cool moisture on his face as I brushed my hand along his jaw, tangling the fingers of my other hand up into his hair.

It was then that I noticed something strange… Running my hand along his face left something on my fingertips. Like, residue or something. I tried to ignore it, but then I began to feel it on his lips against mine and in his hair.

_What?_

He gave me a deeper, longer kiss that made me moan softly in my throat, almost distracting me from anything out of the ordinary, but when I drew back slightly with a need to regulate my breathing, I had enough coherency to wonder what I'd felt. As I gasped lightly for breath, I glanced down at my hand that was lying against his bare chest.

It was smudged with black, white, and red.

Brow furrowed with confusion, I then looked over at my other hand, which was stained a bright, watery green.

I stared down at my hands, smeared with some sort of strange paint or coating, trying to think of where I knew those colors from…

"Something wrong..._Beautiful?_" he asked. His voice was low and husky and normal at first, but then it changed half-way through to an eerie murmur that I knew all too well by the last word.

My whole world shivered at the sound of it.

My eyes widened, my breath caught, and my head whipped upward to a hideous sight.

The man's face was almost melting, as if the water was washing a layer of thick, oily makeup away. But it was wrong.

It was as if his normal skin was the makeup – the fluid streams rolling down his face were a sun-bronzed peach-ish color – and underneath was the ghoulish façade of the Joker.

The thoughtful dark eyes were soon drowning in swirled pools of shadowy black madness. The blonde of his hair was dribbling down his neck and shoulders, leaving the green behind. His appealing tan skin became a washed-out white, and his attractively wide smile stretched out wider than any smile should be, a curling demonic grin red as blood.

The normalcy was the mask, and the chaos was the true face.

_No…_

_No God, no…_

I was shaking my head with mute horror, unable to handle the concept that the blonde man and the Joker had been one in the same. It was too much.

The skin-colored make-up continued to pour down his face, dripping on me, swirling in the water. It was so wrong, unbearably grotesque. My stomach was churning, my head beginning to spin.

I was suddenly desperate with a desire to escape, but the Joker was still holding onto me securely. No matter how much I kicked and struggled, I couldn't get away. It was like my strength left me, and I was helpless in his arms.

He laughed loudly at my pitiful attempts at freeing myself.

_No!_

The water was so cold all of a sudden, freezing even, stained the color of flesh.

_Please, no!_

The Joker released a giggling growl, taking a rough handful of my hair at the back of my head and yanking me forward for another kiss. His bloody grin was wide enough to swallow me whole.

"_NO!"_ I screamed aloud, finally mustering the power to belt out a solid sign of protest and resistance. With a panicked jerking motion, I lurched upward into consciousness once again, finally waking up from that ridiculous dream-turned-nightmare.

Gasping for breath with a cool sweat on my brow, I looked around with wide eyes, seeing the somewhat familiar sights of the uneven stone walls and the piles of gathered supplies and the crates and the pillows and such.

I was in the cave. Everything was okay. It was just a dream. _It was just a dream…_

I gave a heavy sigh and closed my eyes and collapsed back down among my blankets and pillows. They weren't as squishy as I'd remembered…

"You're _quite_ a, uh…_talented_ _screamer_, y'know that?"

My eyes ripped open once again at the sound of that voice, the owner of which I apparently _couldn't even escape in my subconscious mind_. It was a reminder that being in the cave wasn't all that much better than where I'd been in my dream. For one thing, I could _die_ here, without the ability to ever wake up again.

My reality was worse than a nightmare.

Everything was _**not**_ okay.

With a gasp of horrified surprise, I lifted myself up off of what I'd thought was just a pile of pillows, only to find that I was lying on top of the Joker. Granted, he was partially buried in pillows for some reason, one almost completely covering up his face, but that did little to comfort me – it was still pretty obvious that it was him, meaning there was really no reason for me to mistake him for anything other than what he was. No excuse...

_What the –? Why was I–? He –?!_

He grinned at me from underneath the one pillow, waving at me with one purple-gloved hand.

I blanched, rather speechless, a blush swirling hotly within my face. A tiny part of me wondered if I was still dreaming… _hoped_ that I was still dreaming, that maybe I was really safe at home and this whole thing wasn't remotely real…

"_Uh-__**Good morning**_," the Joker murmured with a sultry lick of his lips, making my skin crawl.

That was the screaming kick to my coherency that I needed to think straight.

With a choking gasp and a panicked shake of my head, I pushed off of him and lurched swiftly upward, tripping over the blankets tangling around my legs and falling backward rather messily. I landed on my butt, which hurt against the hard stone of the cave floor. I winced, panting for breath, clutching my pounding head and just trying to figure everything out.

The Joker giggled at my erratic movements, making me glare at him.

"What the hell were you doing?!" I shrieked, gesturing wildly to him where he still resided among the pile of pillows.

"…_Meee?_" he asked as he sat up, looking around as if there were other people to blame that I could've been yelling at aside from him, "Well, _**I**_ was just _sleeping here_… _**You're**_ the one that got _all_ _cuddly_."

I scoffed with disbelief, glowering at the accusatory purple finger he was pointing at me. That he would insinuate such a thing, _snuggling with the Joker_ – but…I did remember that he hadn't been holding onto me like he did the previous night. I'd wanted to move my pillows away from him and he'd refused again, but he hadn't held me against my will. We'd just both fallen asleep in the same pile of pillows, me as far away from him as I could be without physically moving the pillows.

I'd been given some semblance of freedom this time... but I was known for kicking and tossing around…as well having some instances of sleep-walking…

Had I really…?

"So, uh, that sounded like _some __**night**__-__**mare**_… About _wha__**t**__?_"

The Joker's question called me out of my inner contemplations, making me stiffen at the concept of telling him the truth of what I'd actually dreamt of. I looked over at him, still sitting among the pillows, and I couldn't help but wonder if he had ever looked like that blonde man at any point in his life. I supposed it was a remote possibility – I knew nothing about him – but still…The whole thing seemed too ridiculous to even consider…

The dark eyes, tanned skin, blonde hair, and wide, wonderful smile of my dream floated back into my brain for just an instant, and I couldn't help but blush.

"N-Nothing," I said quickly, standing up and kicking the tangled blankets off of my legs. I felt like I needed to leave the cavern just to get out from under his probing, piercing black gaze. I walked out onto the flat ground in front of the cave's entrance, sitting down for a while on the edge and staring out into the tropical surroundings.

The sun was still coming up, coloring the sky and the clouds it contained. It was rather chilly, especially with the barest sheen of sweat that still clung to my skin. I shivered there, trying really hard to just clear my mind, of the man and the kiss and the make-up and the Joker and everything.

It was then that I heard the uneven rhythm of footsteps approaching from behind. I sighed, turning and opening my mouth to tell him to go away – but then I found the broad side of a knife pressed against my lips.

I inhaled sharply, my eyes wide and frightened, looking up at the Joker who had crouched down to my level, his face mere inches away from mine.

"Y'know…you're a _**good**_ _screa-mer_…" he muttered, nodding his head vigorously in agreement with his own statement, but then he leaned closer and pressed the knife harder against my mouth, the edges of the blade just barely cutting into my skin, "…but yer, um, _**lying**_ needs _a little work-uh_…"

I trembled, unable to say anything, afraid to even swallow for fear of somehow provoking him further. My heart was hammering in my chest. I couldn't even begin to think of an explanation for his behavior… though it wasn't like there often were explanations…

The Joker smiled then, as if nothing had happened, giving me a spastic little pat on the head as he tucked his knife away in his pocket and stood back up straight once again. Then he strolled off down the mountain path without another word.

I sat there, dumb-founded and gaping, until I tasted blood from my newly-acquired cuts and decided to shut my mouth. I wiped my lips on a scrap of cloth that I'd scavenged from the ship yesterday, stuffing the bloody thing back into my pocket. I made some faces to myself, feeling the sting as I angered my injuries.

_What the hell…?_

And I figured I would be saying that a lot during my time with the Joker, however long or short that time may be…

* * *

**Well, there you go. I figured you deserved a little fan-service/romance with how long I've been gone, but I hope I didn't over-do it… I was kind of running blind with this idea…**

**Thanks again! Please let me know if you have any plot ideas or tips for writer's block.**

**All support and encouragement are…well, encouraged. :)**

**Love,**

**~SD and Mr. J**


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